How do you create a symbolic link in Unix?

An Administrator, or Administrative Assistant, performs clerical duties to help an office run smoothly and efficiently. Their duties include answering phone calls and emails, greeting and directing office visitors to designated meeting areas and building spreadsheets or presentations for leadership staff.

To create a symbolic link is Linux use the ln command with the -s option. For more information about the ln command, visit the ln man page or type man ln in your terminal. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment.

To create a symbolic link pass the -s option to the ln command followed by the target file and the name of link. In the following example a file is symlinked into the bin folder. In the following example a mounted external drive is symlinked into a home directory.

To view the symbolic links in a directory:

  1. Open a terminal and move to that directory.
  2. Type the command: ls -la. This shall long list all the files in the directory even if they are hidden.
  3. The files that start with l are your symbolic link files.

To make links between files you need to use ln command. A symbolic link (also known as a soft link or symlink) consists of a special type of file that serves as a reference to another file or directory.

To create a hard links on a Linux or Unix-like system:

  1. Create hard link between sfile1file and link1file, run: ln sfile1file link1file.
  2. To make symbolic links instead of hard links, use: ln -s source link.
  3. To verify soft or hard links on Linux, run: ls -l source link.

A hard link is a file that points to the same underlying inode, as another file. In case you delete one file, it removes one link to the underlying inode. Whereas a symbolic link (also known as soft link) is a link to another filename in the filesystem.

The reason hard-linking directories is not allowed is a little technical. Essentially, they break the file-system structure. You should generally not use hard links anyway. Symbolic links allow most of the same functionality without causing problems (e.g ln -s target link ).

Soft links are similar to shortcuts, and can point to another file or directory in any file system. Hard links are also shortcuts for files and folders, but a hard link cannot be created for a folder or file in a different file system. Let’s look at the steps involved in creating and removing a symlink.

A symbolic link, also termed a soft link, is a special kind of file that points to another file, much like a shortcut in Windows or a Macintosh alias. Unlike a hard link, a symbolic link does not contain the data in the target file. The ln command then creates the symbolic link. …

A hard link is essentially a label or name assigned to a file. This new link is not a separate copy of the old file, but rather a different name for exactly the same file contents as the old file. …

To determine whether the folder is a symbolic link you can use either of these methods.

  1. GUI Method: The folder icon will be different. The icon of the folder would have an arrow.
  2. CLI Method. The output of ls -l will clearly indicate that the folder is a symbolic link and it will also list the folder where it points to.

Then, there are three ways to change the symlink:

  1. Use ln with -f force and even for directories -n (inode could get reused): ln -sfn /some/new/path linkname.
  2. Remove the symlink and create a new one (even for directories): rm linkname; ln -s /some/new/path linkname.
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