--- layout: page category: Filesystem tags: Hard links author: Ricardo Vivanco title: fs previous-page: pages/fs/Hard ---

Hard and Symbolic links

In Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, “everything is a file” and a file is fundamentally a link to an inode (a data structure that stores everything about a file apart from its name and actual content). A hard link is a file that points to the same underlying inode, as another file. In case you delete one file, it removes one link to the underlying inode. Whereas a symbolic link (also known as soft link) is a link to another filename in the filesystem. Another important difference between the two types of links is that hard links can only work within the same filesystem while symbolic links can go across different filesystems.