Hard links vs. Soft links

[Shu-Wie F Chen]

In article <1084.26d2a42b at desire.wright.edu>, anagram at desire.wright.edu
((For Mongo)) writes:
|>What is the difference between a hard link and a soft link?  Besides the fact
|>that a hard link seems to make a copy of the file, while the soft link just
       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A hard link associates another file name to a file.  It does *not* make
a copy. 

|>points the OS to the real file.  In broader terms, my question is
this: I have
|>a Tektronix 4301 that has the commands ls, ll, lf, lg, and lx, all of
which are
|>derivatives or ls.  They are all the same size, and they are all linked
|>together.  When I had a system error and all the links were destroyes, I
|>deleted them all, except ls, and re-linked them using soft links.  I saved
|>about a quarter of a meg of disk-space.  I have come across some other files
|>that are the same way, and am wondering how much space I can save,
compared to
|>how much system performance I will lose.  Can anyone tell me how soft
links vs.
|>hard links will affect system performance. 

The -i option to ls tells you the inode of the file associated with each
file name (note the distinction between file and file name).  You might
want to do a ls -i to see what is really going on.

On a side note, you might want to alias ll, lf, lg, and lx to 'ls -xxx'
instead of keeping separate binaries.  For instance, I have ll aliased
to  ls -lasF.

|>
|>Thanks,
|>Steve P Potter
|>Systems Manager
|>Mission Research Corp
                
You're welcome.

*swfc