There are 2 types of links; symbolic links, which refer to a symbolic path indicating the abstract location of another file, and hard links, which refer to the specific location of physical data. A Link count shows how many directory entries link to the file.
A file's link count is displayed in the second column of output from the ls -l . This number represents the total number of links that have been created to point to the data. Each time a new link is created, this value is increased by 1. When a link is removed, the value is decreased by 1. It keeps a count so when you do rm commands against a 'copy' of the file the link count gets decremented, when it reaches 0 the actual file is, finally, deleted.

Any number of hard links to physical data may be created. Links can be created by using the ln command

more info here on link counts-
http://teaching.idallen.com/cst8129/...nd_inodes.html
The Answer Guy 35: Listing "Just the Links": It's the only way, Luke