Symbolic Links
UNIX filesystems have a feature called symbolic links, which are files that point to another file, called the target. They're similar to shortcuts in Windows.
There are two kinds of symbolic links: hard links and soft links.
Hard Links
Hard links create a file which points to the same space on the hard drive as the file which is being linked to, rather than to that file itself.
/home/me/file /home/you/file
| |
hard link hard link
| ,'
V _.-`
HARD DRIVE <....--``
A file won't be deleted until every hard link to it is deleted.
To create a hard link, you use the ln
command with the source file, and the target hard linked file:
ln arrayDat.txt arrayHard.txt
ls
Notice that any changes you make to arrayDat.txt
will be reflected in arrayHard.txt
.
Soft Links
Soft links create a file which points to the original file or directory.
/home/me/file <---Soft link--- /home/you/file
|
|
V
HARD DRIVE
Soft links break if the original file is deleted.
To create a soft link, you use the ln
command with the -s
flag.
ln -s arrayDat.txt arraySoft.txt
ls -l
Notice that any changes you make to arrayDat.txt
will be reflected in arraySoft.txt
. The ls
command will show that arraySoft.txt
points to the file arrayDat.txt
.
Your Luria home folder has a couple of soft links automatically set up pointing to storage servers so that common programs don't take up too much space on the head node.
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