Symbolic links , Symlink or Soft link in Unix are very important concept to understand and use in various UNIX operating systems e.g. Linux , Solaris or IBM AIX. Symlinks gives you so much power and flexibility that you can maintain things quite easily.I personally feel that along with find, grep and other UNIX commands, command to create soft link and update soft link i.e. ln -s is also must for any one working in UNIX machine. Whenever I do scripting or write any UNIX script I always write for symlinks rather than pointing to absolute path of directories in UNIX. It gives you flexibility of changing the symlink or soft link without making any change on your tried and tested scripts. I have worked on many different core Java projects which run on Linux and UNIX machine and make extensive use of UNIX symbolic links or symlinks. All my project which are on finance domain and on electronic trading systems have there server running on Linux, Since speed is major concern in online stock or futures trading where orders has to hit the market within micro seconds Linux server is ideal choice for electronic and fix trading systems and since your server is on UNIX you have to be expert of Unix command to work efficiently and these articles are my result of those effort to learn and share new UNIX commands. In this UNIX fundamental tutorial we will see How to create soft link in UNIX, How to update soft link and Difference between Soft link and Hard link in Unix and Linux. By the way this UNIX command tutorial is in continuation of my earlier article top networking commands in Unix and CVS command examples , if you haven’t read already you may find some useful information based on my experience in Unix and Linux commands.
First difference between soft link and hard link is that Unix Soft links are pointers to programs, files, or directories located elsewhere (just like Windows shortcuts) , while Unix Hard links are pointers to programs and files, but NOT directories.
2) Second major difference between UNIX soft link and hard link is that If the original program, file, or directory is renamed, moved, or deleted, the soft link is broken and it will show in red color if you using ls -lrt --color option. On the other hand, If the original program or file is renamed, moved, or deleted, the hard link is NOT broken
3) One not so important difference on soft link vs hard link is that, If you type ls -F you can see which files are UNIX soft links because they end with @
4) Another difference between soft link vs hard link is how you create them, To create a soft link called "current" that points to a file or directory called "new_package", use this: ln -s new_package latest to remember this command always remember that name of soft link comes as last argument. On the other side to create a UNIX hard link called myhardlink.txt that points to a file called myfile.txt, use this: ln myfile.txt myhardlink.txt
5) One more significant difference on soft link and hard link on UNIX or Linux is that, soft link can point to a network mounted directory also. For creating unix soft link remember to use option "-s" with UNIX link command "ln". While, Hard links in UNIX cannot span disk drives, so you CANNOT have a hard link on /dev/hdb that refers to a program or file on /dev/hda
