Comments on: Create a Symbolic Link in UNIX

By: nooby

nooby — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 08:22:11 +0000

Hallo,
indeed I need some help! i’m absolutly new at linux! but I have to administrate a internalwebserver, which is running with Joomla 1.5. We had a symlink to a share on an other Server, but it doesn’t work now. I tried to link again with:

sudo ln -s \\server\share /var/www/joomla15/slw/

when I do this I get back, that the file does exist. But the hp the link doesn’t work! so awhat can I do?

By: NN

NN — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:16:00 +0000

Thanks Jim for a very good explanation!

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:35:00 +0000

Oh…sorry…one last thing…a file is not actually deleted unless its hard link count is 1. *THEN* it is gone.

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:33:00 +0000

Vick: Sorry, but that isn’t correct. If you have a file called ‘new’, for instance, and create a hard link called ‘new2′, both ‘new’ and ‘new2′ point to the same physical location on the hard drive. If you do an ‘ls -l new’ you will see something like:

-rw-r–r– 2 new

That *2* is the number of hard links to the file. Every file upon creation has one hard link to the location itself, which is why you normally see ‘1′ in this spot for files.

Now, to get back to what I was explaining, if you have ‘new’ and ‘new2′ which is a hard link to ‘new’, and you delete ‘new’, the file is not gone. ‘new2′ still points to that file and is completely usable. Other hard links are not ‘magically’ deleted…and that is the value in a hard link.

If ‘new2′ was a soft link, however, to ‘new’, and you deleted ‘new’, then ‘new2′ would still exist, but would not be valid any longer, since the file ‘new’ that it points to no longer exists.

Hope this helps.

By: Vick

Vick — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:05:00 +0000

A hard link is another name for an existing file; there is no difference between the link and the original file. So if you make a hard link from file `foo’ to file `bar’, and then remove file `bar’, file `foo’ is also removed. Each file has at least one hard link, which is the original file name itself. Directories always have at least two hard links–the directory name itself (which appears in its parent directory) and the special file `.’ inside the directory. Likewise, when you make a new subdirectory, the parent directory gains a new hard link for the special file `..’ inside the new subdirectory.

By: Pranab

Pranab — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:15:00 +0000

What is the Difference between symlink and hard link

By: Thomas

Thomas — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:53:00 +0000

> ln -s /export/space/common/archive /archive
Just what i was looking for. Thanks!

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:20:00 +0000

Maybe you could provide the command syntax to make it a hard link:

ln ../init.d/httpd S77httpd

By: Nathan Stiles

Nathan Stiles — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:15:00 +0000

cd /etc/rc2.d
ln -s ../init.d/httpd S77httpd

All rc links should be hardlinks. This is not a good example.