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Hard Links and Soft or Sym links

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Operating Systems Solaris Hard Links and Soft or Sym links
# 1  
Old 06-30-2011
Hard Links and Soft or Sym links
When loooking at files in a directory using ls, how can I tell if I have a hard link or soft link?
Harleyrci
# 2  
Old 06-30-2011
Finding Soft Link

lr--r--r-- --> if it starts with l (then it means soft link)

To create soft link

Code:
ln -s abc.txt efg.txt

Finding hard link

Hard link shares the same inode.

Code:
$ ln abc.txt efg.txt

do ls -li and check the first column value.

both abc.txt and efg.txt have the same value
# 3  
Old 06-30-2011
Thanks for taking the time to answer a very simple question. I did some more reading and I also find that hard links are only on files and not directories. Is that true.
Harleyrci
# 4  
Old 06-30-2011
It is indeed true, at least on all file systems Solaris supports.
# 5  
Old 06-30-2011
The "." and ".." special directories originally used to be directory hardlinks (created by hand!) but this hasn't been the case for decades now. This discussion's come up a few times, and nobody's managed to find a modern OS that supports directory hardlinks so far.
# 6  
Old 06-30-2011
Quote:
Originally Posted by Corona688
The "." and ".." special directories originally used to be directory hardlinks (created by hand!) but this hasn't been the case for decades now. This discussion's come up a few times, and nobody's managed to find a modern OS that supports directory hardlinks so far.
I shudder to think that a file system would risk the real possibility of recursion when directories are hard linked.

Maybe a wee bit off topic, but maybe not, Rob Pike (Bell Labs then, now at Google) wrote an interesting paper on getting '..' right after the introduction of symbolic (soft) links:

Lexical File Names in Plan 9 or Getting Dot-Dot Right

Certainly an interesting read.
# 7  
Old 07-01-2011
Linux supports mount --bind originaldir newdir, which makes the contents from originaldir also appear in newdir without the pathing ambiguity a symlink makes. (And adding a totally new kind of ambiguity, heh -- the files now have two equally valid paths.)
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