Hard link vs Symbolic link

2 min readJan 16, 2018

In a Linux file system , a link is a connection between a file name and the

actual data on the disk. There are two main types of links that can be created:

“hard” links, and “soft” or symbolic links.

Hard links refer to the specific location of physical data.

Symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) Refer to a symbolic path indicating

the abstract location of another file.

How to create symbolic link/hard link

Soft links are created with the ln command. For example, the following

would create a soft link named school_project to a file named project_linked,

both in the current directory

$ ln -s school_project project_linked

Sample output

The syntax is as follows to create a hard link named sh_pr_hard_linked to a file named school_project:

$ ln school_project sh_pr_hard_linked

Sample output

After creating the symbolic link, it may generally be treated as an alias for the

target. Any file system management commands (e.g., cp, rm) may be used

on the symbolic link. Commands which read or write file contents will access

the contents of the target file. The rm (delete file) command, however,

removes the link itself, not the target file. Likewise, the mv command moves

or renames the link, not the target.

There are some issues with hard links that can sometimes make them

unsuitable. First of all, because the link is identical to the thing it points to, it

becomes difficult to give a command such as “list all the contents of this

directory recursively but ignore any links”. Most modern operating systems

don’t allow hard links on directories to prevent endless recursion. Another

drawback of hard links is that they have to be located within the same file

system, and most large systems today consist of multiple file systems.