Thomas, Many thanks. That is very helpful. I have always used symlinks and have never run across a description of the difference I have understood, but I think I have a handle on it as you described it. Chuck On Tue, 14 Oct 2003, Thomas Stivers wrote: > On 10/14/03 4:42 PM -0400, Chuck Hallenbeck wrote: > > Luke, > > > > While you are at it, what exactly is the difference between a > > hard link and a soft link? > > The difference is that a symbolic (soft) link is a special file which > contains the name of the file it points to. Symbolic links can work > across file systems which hard links cannot. > > Hard links are simply references to the same inode by another name, but > in every way besides the name they *are* the same file. Here is a sample "ls -l" that illustrates this. > > total 0 > -rw-r--r-- 2 thomas thomas 0 2003-10-14 16:00 file1 > -rw-r--r-- 2 thomas thomas 0 2003-10-14 16:00 hard1 > lrwxrwxrwx 1 thomas thomas 5 2003-10-14 16:00 sym1 -> file1 > > In this example file1 is a regular file and hard1 is a link to it. The > number 2 after the file permissions means that the file has two names > linked to it and if we "rm" either file1 or hard1 that number will > decrease to 1. A key point is that they are both references to the same > file. The third entry sym1 is a symbolic link and is a different file > altogether, but it contains the name of file1 and because the file > system knows it is a link it will look for file1. I hope this doesn't > muddy the waters too much and Luke's description is still more > practical. > > -- The Moon is Waning Gibbous (82% of Full) Get my public key from website, http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh
