We now come back to the mystery of why removing a file is performed via unlink(), by understanding a new way to make an entry in the file system tree, through a system call known as link(). The link() system call takes two arguments, an old pathname and a new one; when you “link” a new file name to an old one, you essentially create another way to refer to the same file. The command-line program ln is used to do this, as we see in this example:
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