3.3.5.1. Link types

Since we know more about files and their representation in the file system, understanding links (or shortcuts) is a piece of cake. A link is nothing more than a way of matching two or more file names to the same set of file data. There are two ways to achieve this:

• Hard link: Associate two or more file names with the same inode. Hard links share the same data blocks on the hard disk, while they continue to behave as independent files.

  There is an immediate disadvantage: hard links can't span partitions, because inode numbers are only unique within a given partition.

• Soft link or symbolic link (or for short: symlink): a small file that is a pointer to another file. A symbolic link contains the path to the target file instead of a physical location on the hard disk. Since inodes are not used in this system, soft links can span across partitions.

The two link types behave similar, but are not the same, as illustrated in the scheme below:

Note that removing the target file for a symbolic link makes the link useless.

Each regular file is in principle a hardlink. Hardlinks can not span across partitions, since they refer to inodes, and inode numbers are only unique within a given partition.

It may be argued that there is a third kind of link, the user-space link, which is similar to a shortcut in MS Windows. These are files containing meta-data which can only be interpreted by the graphical file manager. To the kernel and the shell these are just normal files. They may end in a .desktop or .lnk suffix; an example can be found in ~/.gnome-desktop:

[dupont@boulot .gnome-desktop]$ cat La\ Maison\ Dupont
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=Legacy-Mixed
Name=La Maison Dupont
Type=X-nautilus-home
X-Nautilus-Icon=temp-home
URL=file:///home/dupont

This example is from a KDE desktop:

[lena@venus Desktop]$ cat camera
[Desktop Entry]
Dev=/dev/sda1
FSType=auto
Icon=memory
MountPoint=/mnt/camera
Type=FSDevice
X-KDE-Dynamic-Device=true

Creating this kind of link is easy enough using the features of your graphical environment. Should you need help, your system documentation should be your first resort.

In the next section, we will study the creation of UNIX-style symbolic links using the command line.