Hi,

Can somebody please help me in knowing the difference between soft (Symbolic) link and hard link.
Please explain it in as simple terms as possible.

Kris

Hope this helps:

Soft Link:
-------------

- Soft links are links to a file but not the inode.

- Created using
ln -s file1 file2

=> ls -il

131135 lrwxrwxrwx 1 user user 5 Jul 10 09:04 file2 -> file1
131137 -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 35 Jul 10 09:03 file1

- The inode for file1 is 131137 and inode for file2 is 131135.
- If you see the permission bits, there is 'l' in the front for a soft link.
- If file1 is deleted, the link still exists. But if you try to view file2, its empty. This means that once the main file is deleted the data is gone.


Hard Link:
--------------

- Hard links are links to inode

- Created using

ln file1 file2

=> ls -il

131136 -rw-r--r-- 2 user user 48 Jul 10 09:27 file1
131136 -rw-r--r-- 2 user user 48 Jul 10 09:27 file2

- The inode for file1 and file2 is the same (131136).
- If you see the output above for "ls -i", file2 does not show that it is linked to file1. In reality it is not linked to file1 but it is linked to the inode.
- If you see that there is number '2' before the username 'user'. This shows the number of hard links to the inode.
- If file1 is deleted, the data is not deleted. If you view file2 the data is still there. Deleting file1 only deletes a link. The data is gone once the last hard link is deleted.

Thanks so much for your simple but greatly helpful explanation.
Thanks a ton.

Thanks a lot for ur definition. can you pls let me know actually what is the use of using hard link and soft link.

It's best to create your questions in new threads instead of resurrecting ones that've been dead for two years.

Hardlinks only work on the same partition, since inodes are local to their particular partition. Symlinks, which just store the filename and path, work across partitions. Hard links never break, while it's quite possible to have and make invalid symlinks.