faisal gillani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > what is the diffrence between a symbolic & a hard link ?
A symbolic link is a directory entry that points to the name of another file. For example: dmaze% echo hello > foo dmaze% ln -s foo bar dmaze% ls -l bar lrwxrwxrwx 1 dmaze dmaze 3 Apr 27 23:55 bar -> foo dmaze% cat bar hello dmaze% echo goodbye > foo dmaze% cat bar goodbye On the other hand, a hard link means giving two names to the same file. This means you can do things like this: dmaze% echo hello > foo dmaze% ln foo bar dmaze% ls -i foo bar 32412 bar 32412 foo dmaze% rm foo dmaze% cat bar hello dmaze% echo goodbye > foo dmaze% cat bar hello (With a symbolic link, the fourth and fifth commands would produce an error; bar would be a 'dangling' symlink, pointing to a nonexistent file named foo.) In general, symbolic links are used over hard links, since it is much easier to tell what is intended to be a link and what isn't. It also means that, if you want to replace the file that the links point to, you can just do that without worrying about rebinding the links to the new file. It is also the case that, except under certain restricted conditions, you cannot create hard links to directories; you must use symbolic links. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
