Hard links vs. symbolic links

Everybody uses links in his everyday virtual life. I don't think anyone could imagine navigating between websites without using hyper-refs, but let's move to links that refer to our file-system. If You had some experience with MS Windows before, You're probably familiar with symbolic links, aka shortcuts.

In general symbolic links may be interpreted as pointers directed to our files logical layer. In a larger scope this may look like a pointer to the pointer of physical data. If this still looks confusing, have a look at an example:

~ $ echo "Test file" > f1.txt
~ $ ln -s f1.tx f2.txt

This may be visualized the following way ("Test file" is the physical data here):

Now you can access the physical data using both f1.txt and f2.txt. However, if You delete f1.txt, the physical data will be lost (no label will point to it). A different situation occurs when You use hard links instead. Each time You create a file, a label is hard linked to it. In the previous example the hard link was created by executing:

~ $ echo "Test file" > f1.txt

By default each chunk of physical data has only 1 hard link attached, but more may be attached. For example:

~ $ ln f1.txt f2.txt 

Will create a hard link with label f2.txt to the physical data of f1.txt, let's visualize it:

You can access the physical data both via f1.txt and f2.txt. Unlike symbolic links, each of the hard links works even if the other stops to exist. In order to delete the physical data you need to unlink all hard links that point to it (rm f1.txt alone will not do...).

To sum up, symbolic links are cool because they operate on the logical layer, and thus are not limited to a single file system. Furthermore symbolic links may point to directories which is an important feature.

Hard links also have some features that their symbolic cousins have not. Hard links are always bound the the physical source of data, thus making them move/rename proof (symbolic links are not updated if you move/rename a corresponding hard link).

Hope this overview helps you to choose a right link for each situation.

Cheers!

~KR