Hard and Soft Links
1.5.2 Hard and Soft Links A filename included in a directory is called a file hard link , or more simply a link . The same file may have several links included in the same directory or in different ones, thus several filenames. The Unix command: $ ln f1 f2, is used to create a new hard link that has the pathname f2 for a file identified by the pathname f1. Hard links have two limitations: • Users are not allowed to create hard links for directories. This might transform the directory tree into a graph with cycles, thus making it impossible to locate a file according to its name. • Links can be created only among files included in the same filesystem. This is a serious limitation since modern Unix systems may include several filesystems located on different disks and/or partitions, and users may be unaware of the physical divisions between them. In order to overcome these limitations, soft links (also called symbolic links ) have been int...