Let me tell you a story ....

Once upon a time there was a house, located at /main_dir avenue. It was a big house, with apartments file1 and file2 and so on.

When mail came (you know "mail", yes? It is e-mail based on paper instead of electricity), it was addressed to /main_dir/1/file1, /main_dir/1/file2 or any of the other apartments. The "/1" came because it was the first house in /main_dir avenue. This was the list of tenants in the house:

Code:

# ls -l /main_dir/1
-rw------- 1 tenant house       0 Aug 28 18:54 file1
-rwxr-xr-- 1 tenant house     355 Aug 25 02:15 file2
-rwxrwxrwx 1 tenant house     804 Aug 22 11:32 file3
-rw-r--r-- 1 tenant house 1226240 Aug 23 16:24 file4

But one day the owner of the house noticed that the house was not only located at /main_dir avenue. In fact it was located at the intersection of /main_dir avenue and and /softlink street. And because he wanted maximum comfort for his tenants he called the architect to build a second entry from /softlink street. An the architect went to work:

Code:

# ln -s /main_dir/1 /softlink/24

As you can see the new entry got number 24 at /softlink street. From this day on mail could be addressed o either /main_dir/1/file1 or /softlink/24/file1 because /main_dir/1 and /softlink/24 were different entries to the same building, but the apartment file1 was still the same, regardless of which entry you used to enter the building on your way to it.

And tomorrow, i will tell you another old story ..... ;-))

I hope this helps.

bakunin