Comments on: Understanding Symbolic Links

By: From scripts to commands « Blojects

From scripts to commands « Blojects — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:10:08 +0000

[...] Symbolic Links: http://www.nixtutor.com/freebsd/understanding-symbolic-links/ [...]

By: mib

mib — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 20:42:32 +0000

If you want to completely remove a file and its hard links, all in one shot, another way would be removing the file by its *inode number* (ls -il), using find:

find . -inum 192222 -exec rm {} \;

BTW, same method can be used to remove/rename bad filenames.

By: Sync Config Files Across Multiple Computers with Dropbox

Sync Config Files Across Multiple Computers with Dropbox — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:11:55 +0000

[...] typically used to sync files that reside in the /home/Dropbox directory we are going to make use of symbolic links to link files outside this directory in an attempt to sync config files across multiple Linux [...]

By: clarity4sure

clarity4sure — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:27:40 +0000

Dude, love the Practice Makes Perfect bit, I’m new to unix and find a good deal of forum posts (and other posts) to be a bit pretentious in their premise that clarity is universal about some, what may appear to be, basics. What I’ve discovered is this is an incorrect premise and generally some simple (and quick) justification of the context of the posting adds heaps to not only the validity of the information, but the overall usefulness, by providing a ‘ball park’ for the remarks. Thanks. Mark

By: Mark Sanborn

Mark Sanborn — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:49:35 +0000

Opps it looks like I made a mistake when talking about hard Links. The post is updated.

Thanks for the comments guys

By: John

John — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:49:40 +0000

When you remove a file, you remove a (hard) link. That’s why the Unix syscall is called unlink(). Most files have one link. Your hard link commands above show creating an additional link. At that point, removing one link will still leave the other. When you remove the last link, the file is finally removed. Try it!

By: Rhabarberkuchen

Rhabarberkuchen — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:08:42 +0000

Hard links are not removed when the original file is removed. In fact, the operating system can’t distinguish between the original and the hard link.

The OS keeps a counter how often a certain file is linked to via hard links (including the initial reference, which is nothing else but just a hard link). When that counter reaches zero, the file is removed.

If you post a “Understanding …” entry on a site named “nixtutor”, do a little research first, please.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 03:39:43 +0000

Hard Links: “Links are removed if the original file is deleted”

This is not true. A file exists in one block on disk (for simplicity), each inode in the filesytem will point to this block. The block will have a reference count (the number of inodes referencing this block). The block is not recovered “marked free” unless the reference count is zero. So, for the file to be deleted all links must be removed. Removing one hard link does not affect the other links until they are all gone.

By: Anon

Anon — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 03:23:39 +0000

Removing the original file does not remove the hardlinks. They are still acessible.

By: drbobb

drbobb — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 21:26:07 +0000

you wrote:

“if you remove a the original file all hard links will also disappear.”

to which I say: Huh?