Cheatsheet: Difference between revisions

;Links and index number in Linux

* In the output of ls -l, the column following the permissions and before owner is the link count.

drwxr-xr-x '''6''' aman aman 4096 Mar 30 11:50 Documents

drwxr-xr-x '''3''' aman aman 4096 Sep 15 19:11 Downloads

^

* Link count is the number of Hard Links to a file.

* A link is a pointer to another file.

* There are two types of links:

;Symbolic links (or Soft Links)

* A separate file whose contents point to the linked-to file.

* When creating a Sym link, first refer to the name of the original file and then to the name of the link:

ln -s /home/bob/sync.sh filesync

* Editing Sym link is like directly edit the original file.

* If we delete or move the original file, the link will be broken and our filesync file will not be longer available.

* The ls -l command shows that the resulting file is a symbolic link:

ls -l filesync

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Apr 7 06:08 filesync -> /home/bobbin/sync.sh

* The contents of a symbolic link are the name of target file only.

* The permissions on the symbolic link are completely open.

* This is because the permissions are not managed

* The original file is just a name that is connected directly to the inode, and the symbolic link refers to the name.

* The size of the symbolic link is the number of bytes in the name of the file it refers to, because no other information is available in the symbolic link.

;Hard links