What is a soft (“symbolic”) link? How do I create a soft link (symbolic link) under UNIX or Linux operating system?
To make links between files you need to use ln command. A symbolic link (also known as a soft link or symlink) consists of a special type of file that serves as a reference to another file or directory. Unix/Linux like operating systems often uses symbolic links.
Two types of links
There are two types of links
- symbolic links: Refer to a symbolic path indicating the abstract location of another file
- hard links : Refer to the specific location of physical data.
How do I create soft link / symbolic link?
Soft links are created with the ln command. For example, the following would create a soft link named link1 to a file named file1, both in the current directory
$ ln -s file1 link1
To verify new soft link run:
$ ls -l file1 link1
Sample outputs:
-rw-r--r-- 1 veryv wheel 0 Mar 7 22:01 file1 lrwxr-xr-x 1 veryv wheel 5 Mar 7 22:01 link1 -> file1
From the above outputs it is clear that a symbolic link named ‘link1’ contains the name of the file named ‘file1’ to which it is linked. So the syntax is as follows to create a symbolic link in Unix or Linux, at the shell prompt:
$ ln -s {source-filename} {symbolic-filename}
For example create a softlink for /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php as /home/vivek/index.php, enter the following command:
$ ln -s /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php /home/vivek/index.php
$ ls -l
Sample outputs:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 vivek vivek 16 2007-09-25 22:53 index.php -> /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php
You can now edit the soft link named /home/vivek/index.php and /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php will get updated:
$ vi /home/vivek/index.php
Your actual file /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php remains on disk even if you deleted the soft link /home/vivek/index.php using the rm command:
$ rm /home/vivek/index.php ## <--- link gone ##
## But original/actual file remains as it is ##
$ ls -l /webroot/home/httpd/test.com/index.php
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