July 2007
Beginner
347 pages
4h 40m
English
Content preview from CLI for Noobies: A Primer on the Linux Command LineBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 17. Symbolic Links
As you can guess by the name, symbolic links are not real links. Using symbolic links lets you more easily do all sorts of neat things, not the least of which is to satisfy dependency issues for needy applications. But before we get into that, we’ll go over the basics. You’ll need to understand both inodes and real links in order to grok symbolic links.
Background: Real Links and inodes
Real links—a.k.a. “hard” links—simply provide another way to access to the same data in a file system. The kernel keeps track of files through the use of inodes rather than file names. File names are for wimps, like human users. The kernel doesn’t need them.
Quoting from the The Free Dictionary, an inode is:
A data structure holding information ...
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