ELI8: Hard Links and Symbolic Links

When you save files, those files are saved in memory somewhere on your computer, and files have an inode that they can refer to. You can think of an inode as an address to reach the place in memory of your file.

Opening that file will look at the inode and pull up the information you requested.

A hard link is like a duplicate copy of your original copy. Almost like a short-cut to the same file. Opening the hard link will also pull up the information you requested. Editing anything will make changes to the file. The hard link acts just like the original copy.

A soft link or symbolic link points to the inode through a file.

Lets say you delete the original copy. Then any symbolic links that pointed to that original copy will also get deleted. However, your duplicate hard link copy will still point to the file and you will still have access to that file.

If you delete the original copy of the file and all hard links, you have no more ways of getting to that file, so you basically deleted that file.

Symbolic links can also point to files from other filesystem since they are essentially just a path to another file.