Concept of link count in linux Post: 302267019

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Operating Systems Linux Concept of link count in linux Post 302267019 by techlinux on Thursday 11th of December 2008 01:28:25 PM

12-11-2008

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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

Last edited by techlinux; 12-11-2008 at 03:03 PM.. Reason: edit url

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switch_root

SWITCH_ROOT(8)						       System Administration						    SWITCH_ROOT(8)

NAME

       switch_root - switch to another filesystem as the root of the mount tree

SYNOPSIS

       switch_root [-hV]

       switch_root newroot init [arg...]

DESCRIPTION

       switch_root moves already mounted /proc, /dev and /sys to newroot and makes newroot the new root filesystem and starts init process.

       WARNING: switch_root removes recursively all files and directories on the current root filesystem.

OPTIONS

       -h, --help
	      show help and exit

       -V, --version
	      show version number and exit

RETURN VALUE

       switch_root returns 0 on success and 1 on failure.

NOTES

       switch_root  will  fail	to  function if newroot is not the root of a mount. If you want to switch root into a directory that does not meet
       this requirement then you can first use a bind-mounting trick to turn any directory into a mount point:

	      mount --bind $DIR $DIR

SEE ALSO

       mount(8) chroot(2) init(8) mkinitrd(8)

AUTHORS

       Peter Jones <pjones@redhat.com>
       Jeremy Katz <katzj@redhat.com>
       Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>

AVAILABILITY

       The switch_root command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.

util-linux							     June 2009							    SWITCH_ROOT(8)