Using symbolic and hard links
If you've used a graphical operating system for more than a week, you're probably more than familiar with the concept of shortcuts. Either on the desktop or within a menu, you will have shortcuts to files and applications. This can be a shortcut to your home or profile directory, a shortcut to an application, an individual file, and so on. We have the same concept in Linux.
With Linux, we can link files to other files, which gives us the ability to create our own shortcuts, which are effectively similar to shortcuts in graphical operating systems, but without the requirement of a GUI. This comes in the form of symbolic and hard links, which are two different methods in which we can link things. Symbolic and hard links are very similar, but to explain them, you'll first need to understand the concept of inodes.
An inode is a data object that contains metadata regarding files within your filesystem. Although a full walkthrough of...