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A mental model for Linux file, hard and soft links


Posted on in Mental model, Linux, RHCSA I always felt bothered about my superficial understanding of inode, hard and soft links in Linux. Here I attempt to structure my learnings into a simplified mental model.

A pathname makes this pair of (inode, data block) accessible and usable for humans. Check out the full explanation, but a concise summary is: ln -s some-file.txt link-file.txt simply creates a link-file.txt file, the content of which is some-file.txt. I always felt bothered about my superficial understanding of inode, hard and soft links in Linux.

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