May 2018
Beginner to intermediate
452 pages
11h 26m
English
A symbolic link is a special filesystem construct that points to another file or directory on the system. Although they exist on Windows, they're far more commonly used on Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like systems; thus, they can be a point of confusion for programmers coming from a Windows environment.
Symbolic links are not to be confused with desktop shortcuts, which also exist on all three major platforms. Shortcuts are just metadata files implemented at the desktop environment level, whereas symbolic links are implemented at the filesystem level.
File and path operations sometimes need to clarify if they're working with the symbolic link itself or the file that the link points to.
For example, consider a link in our ...