4 Answers. You can delete it with rm as usual: rm NameOfFile . Note that with hard links there is no distinction between “the original file” and “the link to the file”: you just have two names for the same file, and deleting just one of the names will not delete the other.
What happens if I delete a hard link?
If you delete the ‘my-hard-link’ of a hard link, the remaining files pointing to that same space (inode) in the hard drive will still contain the data stored on the hard drive.
How do I unlink files in Linux?
The unlink command is used to remove a single file and will not accept multiple arguments. It has no options other than –help and –version . The syntax is simple, invoke the command and pass a single filename as an argument to remove that file. If we pass a wildcard to unlink, you will receive an extra operand error.
How do I change a hard link in Linux?
Use the ln command to create additional hard links to an existing file (but not to a directory, even though the system sets up . and .. as hard links). Listing 1 shows how to create a directory containing two files and a subdirectory with two hard links to file1, one in the same directory and one in the subdirectory.
How do I find a symbolic link?
To view the symbolic links in a directory:
- Open a terminal and move to that directory.
- Type the command: ls -la. This shall long list all the files in the directory even if they are hidden.
- The files that start with l are your symbolic link files.
Does removing a symbolic link remove the file?
Deleting a symbolic link is the same as removing a real file or directory. ls -l command shows all links with second column value 1 and the link points to original file. Link contains the path for original file and not the contents.
Do hard links take up space?
A hard link is a file that represents another file on the same volume without actually duplicating the data of that file. … Although a hard link is essentially a mirrored copy of the target file that it is pointing to, no additional hard drive space is required to store the hard link file.
What is unlink command?
Command. In Unix-like operating systems, unlink is a system call and a command line utility to delete files. The program directly interfaces the system call, which removes the file name and (but not on GNU systems) directories like rm and rmdir.
How do I unlink a file?
The unlink function deletes the file name filename . If this is a file’s sole name, the file itself is also deleted. (Actually, if any process has the file open when this happens, deletion is postponed until all processes have closed the file.) The function unlink is declared in the header file unistd.
How do you link in Linux?
By default, the ln command creates hard links. To create a symbolic link, use the -s ( –symbolic ) option. If both the FILE and LINK are given, ln will create a link from the file specified as the first argument ( FILE ) to the file specified as the second argument ( LINK ).