Chapter 17. Symbolic Links
As you can guess by the name, symbolic links are not real links. Using symbolic links lets you more easily do all sorts of neat things, not the least of which is to satisfy dependency issues for needy applications. But before we get into that, we’ll go over the basics. You’ll need to understand both inodes and real links in order to grok symbolic links.
Background: Real Links and inodes
Real links—a.k.a. “hard” links—simply provide another way to access to the same data in a file system. The kernel keeps track of files through the use of inodes rather than file names. File names are for wimps, like human users. The kernel doesn’t need them.
Quoting from the The Free Dictionary, an inode is:
A data structure holding information ...
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