2.4 Symlinks

We are going to make links between files so that 1 file can be accessed from multiple locations.

become root

We are first going to create a hard link for the file /usr/share/doc/vim-common/README.md and we are going to link it to /root/manual.txt. We are going to use the ln (link) command for this.

ln

Examples on how to do this:

ln /usr/share/doc/vim-common/README.md /root/manual.txt

Use ls -l to check the link count, It should look something like this

-rw-r--r--. 2 root root 4689 Oct 15  2012 manual.txt 

Verify the link count on the original file /usr/share/doc/qrencode-libs-3.4.1/README

ls -l /usr/share/doc/vim-common/README.md

It should look like this:

-rw-r--r--. 2 root root 4689 Oct 15  2012 /usr/share/doc/vim-common/README.md

Now we are going to practice with creating a symbolic link. To create a symbolic we will need to use -s (symbolic) together with the ln command.

Go ahead and link create the symbolic link /root/tmpdir and make it point to /tmp

ln -s /tmp /root/tmpdir

You can again verify the result with the below command:

ls -l /root