Shell Programming and Scripting

hello i like to know how can i check the number of links that a file has. Thats to say, if i use ls -la i can see its hard links, nor its hard and soft links... can i count the number of soft links that an archive has?

thanks!

You can't do that with soft links because you can think of it as something like a Windows "shortcut file" that contains a path to the destination file. The inode of the file being pointed to is not changed with an extra symbolic link. You can view the inode number a hard link file points to with ls -li though, so if it is computationally feasible for you to execute a "ls -liR" (at least valid on Linux) on the entire filesystem then you may be able to find all hard links that point to a specific inode by parsing the results (or else you do it programmatically with, say C or Perl programming).

thank you very much