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Full Discussion: Differentiate Soft and Hard Link
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Differentiate Soft and Hard Link Post 302126149 by hemangjani on Tuesday 10th of July 2007 09:38:41 AM
Old 07-10-2007
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.
 

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LEARN ABOUT HPUX

symlink

symlink(4)						     Kernel Interfaces Manual							symlink(4)

NAME

       symlink - symbolic link

DESCRIPTION

       A symbolic (or soft ) link is a file whose name indirectly refers (points) to a relative or absolute path name.

       During  path  name  interpretation,  a symbolic link to a relative path name is expanded to the path name being interpreted, and a symbolic
       link to an absolute path name is replaced with the path name being interpreted.

       Thus, given the path name

	      If is a symbolic link to a relative path name such as the path name is interpreted as

	      If is a symbolic link to an absolute path name such as the path name is interpreted as

       All symbolic links are interpreted in this manner, with one exception: when the symbolic link is the last component of a path name,  it	is
       passed  as  a  parameter  to  one of the system calls: or (see readlink(2), rename(2), symlink(2), unlink(2), chown(2) and lstat(2)).  With
       these calls, the symbolic link, itself, is accessed or affected.

       Unlike normal (hard) links, a symbolic link can refer to any arbitrary path name and can span different logical devices (volumes).

       The path name can be that of any type of file (including a directory or another symbolic link), and may be invalid if no such  path  exists
       in  the	system.   (It is possible to make symbolic links point to themselves or other symbolic links in such a way that they form a closed
       loop.  The system detects this situation by limiting the number of symbolic links it traverses while translating a path name.)

       The mode and ownership of a symbolic link is ignored by the system, which means that affects the actual file, but not the  file	containing
       the symbolic link (see chmod(1)).

       Symbolic links can be created using or (see ln(1) and symlink(2)).

AUTHOR

       was developed by HP and the University of California, Berkeley.

SEE ALSO

       cp(1), symlink(2), readlink(2), link(2), stat(2), mknod(1M).

																	symlink(4)
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