Attendees: Paul Moreno, Bill Lindemann, Jerry Prevatte, Tom Phillips, Andy Borka, John Davidson, Brock Inglehart and first time attendee David Stagowski.
Andy Borka gave a presentation of Symlink in Ubuntu.
A symbolic link is a special file type whose data contains a filename. This filename is essentially a “soft link” to another file. Whenever the kernel encounters a symbolic link file type, it reads the filename in the data part of the file and goes to that filename. It’s as if the Kernel traverses the namespace for the user. Symbolic links are nice in that they are links at the namespace level rather than at the block level (like hard links)
Symbolic links can do 2 things:
- Link to files across file systems (since that it’s an indirect link)
- Link to directories
Symbolic links are done using the ln command with the -s option.