Solaris

jilliagre -

In really old filesystems it was possible. Ever see a hard-linked directory? It is not allowed now. Read up on it if you want. Why would such a thing be mentioned or considered a problem, you ask?

Maybe it happened a long time ago...

As per above thread, hard link appears to be a just pointer. Soft link is pointer too. Than, what is difference between hard and soft link?

Thanks,
Deepak

You are right, dangling hard-links are actually still possible. For example when using ufs with journaling disabled and after a filesystem corruption or simply after running the clri command.

I though you were confusing with symbolic links because your circular link example "link -> link -> physical file" is something quite hard to achieve with hard-links (hardlinks refer to inodes, not files) but quite common with symlinks.

---------- Post updated at 10:14 ---------- Previous update was at 10:10 ----------

They point to different things.
A hard-link point to actual data while a symbolic (or soft) link point to a filename / path that may exist or not.

If you remove a hard-link, there will be no way to refer to the data unless other hard-links still exist to the very same data while if you remove a symlink, you don't loose data, just a way to refer to it.

the file that has hardlinks is not deleted unless all hardlinks are removed.

and if the file that is pointed to by a symlink is deleted, the symlink becomes invalid, ie, pointing to an non existing file.

this is how i understand the differences between the two in simplest form.

and only after all processes having the file open will close it.
Indeed, making it a dangling link.