Working with Links

Sometimes, it’s helpful to create a shortcut to a file. For example, we may want to keep a configuration file in an easy-to-access location, but a piece of software expects to find that file in a specific location. We can use links to create shortcuts to files.

Looking at inodes

When we create a file, we’re creating a link to an inodeinode. Let’s create a new file named greetings.txt that contains some text:

$ echo "Hi there!" > greetings.txt

Now, we use the ls -i command to look at the inode associated with the file:

$ ls -i greetings.txt

The number that can be seen next to the file name is the inode number associated with the file.

We can create two types of shortcuts, or links, to files. The first type is hard links, which are pointers to the actual inode. The second is symbolic links, or symlinks, which are links to another file. Hard links only work for files, whereas symbolic links work for files and directories.

Let’s look at hard links first. Using the ln command, we create a hard link called salutations that points to greetings.txt:

$ ln greetings.txt salutations

Run the complete code on the terminal below for practice.

echo "Hi there!" > greetings.txt
clear
ln greetings.txt