With Linux, we can link files to other files, which gives us quite a bit of flexibility with how we can manage our data. Symbolic and hard links are very similar, but to explain them, you'll first need to understand the concept of inodes.
We already discussed inodes earlier in this chapter. But as a refresher, an inode is a data object that contains metadata regarding files within your filesystem. Inodes are represented by an integer number, which you can view with the -i
option of the ls
command. On my system, I created two files: file1
and file2
. These files are inodes 543815
and 558287
respectively. You can see this output in the following screenshot where I run the ls -i
command. This information will come in handy shortly.
There are two types of links in Linux: Symbolic Links and Hard Links. This concept is similar in purpose to shortcuts created in graphical user interfaces. Almost all graphical operating systems have a means of creating a...