What is the difference between symbolic and hard links?

Question

When would you use one over the other?

Answer 1

The different semantics between hard and soft links make them suitable for different things.

Hard links:

• indistinguishable from other directory entries, because every directory entry is hard link
• "original" can be moved or deleted without breaking other hard links to the same inode
• only possible within the same filesystem
• permissions must be the same as those on the "original" (permissions are stored in the inode, not the directory entry)
• can only be made to files, not directories

Symbolic links (soft links)

• simply records that point to another file path. (ls -l will show what path a symlink points to)
• will break if original is moved or deleted. (In some cases it is actually desirable for a link to point to whatever file currently occupies a particular location)
• can point to a file in a different filesystem
• can point to a directory
• on some file system formats, it is possible for the symlink to have different permissions than the file it points to (this is uncommon)

Answer 2

The point of both types of links is to provide a way to make a file appear in two locations at the same time. This has a lot of uses. 9 times out of 10 you want to use symbolic links.

Symbolic links, or "symlinks" work a little like Windows shortcuts. The contents of a symlink are a pointer to the real location of the file/directory. If you delete the real file, the symlink will become "dangling," and won't work. Deleting the symlink does not delete the real file. You can have as many symlinks to a single file (or even other symlinks) as you like.

Unlike Windows though, they work on the filesystem level, not shell or application level, so pretty much any application will "follow" symlinks as expected. ls -al can be used as a quick way to see where symlinks "point" to.

Hardlinks work even on a lower level. A hardlink is an actual, physical on-the-filesystem-level directory entry of the file. Technically, a directory entry is a hardlink, thus each file has at least one hardlink in a directory somewhere. Hardlinks are not separate from the file they point to; if a file has multiple hardlinks in different directories, deleting the hardlink with utilities like rm won't truly delete the file, until all hardlinks are gone.

I can't think of situation where use of hardlinks is common, or even needed, unless you intentionally want to prevent the files from getting deleted or are doing some weird low-level work with partitions or other filesystem related things. EDIT: There's great ideas in the other answers to this question, though!

Answer 3

Hard links are very useful for disk-based backup mechanisms, because you can have a full directory tree for each backup while sharing the space for files that haven't changed — and the filesystem keeps track of reference counting, so when the last reference to a given version goes away because the backup was expired/removed for space reasons, the space it used is automatically reclaimed. Some mail clients also use it for messages filed to multiple folders, for the same reason.

Answer 4

Hard links are just references to the same disk spaces, thath the 'why' you cannot hardlink something in other filesystem.

Symlinks are files linking other files (as Windows shortcuts), maybe in the same filesystem, maybe not.

EDIT: I will explain something more. Every file that exists has a minimum of 1 hard link. Hard links are the way to access the content of an inode of the filesystem. You can obtain the inode number of a file with ls -i, and get the number of hardlinks with stat as follows in this example:

$ stat plantilla-disenos.odt 
  File: «plantilla-disenos.odt»
  Size: 12367       Blocks: 32         IO Block: 4096   fichero regular
Device: 803h/2051d  Inode: 319875      Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--)  Uid: ( 1000/   d4rio)   Gid: ( 1000/   d4rio)
Access: 2011-02-11 21:36:19.000000000 -0300
Modify: 2010-03-02 23:27:28.000000000 -0300
Change: 2010-04-10 17:46:27.000000000 -0300

Thanks @geekosaur for this reference:

The kernel has to restart pathname-to-inode translation (traversing the directory tree) to expand symlinks, whereas hard links all use the same inode. (You'll often see this referred to as namei, from the name of the kernel function that did this in traditional Unix.)

and this (edited):

Hard links are very useful for disk-based incremental backup mechanisms like Apple's Time Machine, because you can have a full directory tree for each backup while sharing the space for files that haven't changed — and the filesystem keeps track of reference counting, so when the last reference to a given version goes away because the backup was expired/removed for space reasons, the space it used is automatically reclaimed. Some mail clients also use it for messages filed to multiple folders, for the same reason.

Cheers

Answer 5

A soft link points to another pathname. That pathname may or may not actually exist. The path isn't looked for until you access the symlink. If the path doesn't exist when you try to access it, you have a broken symlink.

With a hard link, you have one file with multiple names. You can't say that one of those is the "real" file and the others are just a link to it. They are all equal. There's no such thing as a broken hard link the way there are broken symlinks.

Hard links work only within a single filesystem. If you want to link to a file on a different filesystem (e.g. a different partition or a network share), you must use a soft link.

Another big difference is what happens when you delete a linked file. If you delete one of a pair of hardlinked files, then create a new file with the same name, you'll have two separate files (the link is gone). If you delete the target of a symlink and create a new file with the same name, the link will point to the new file.

Answer 6

"hard" links share the same inode

$ touch foo
$ ln foo foolink # Creates a hard  link
$ ls -li foo foolink
54996 -rw-r--r-- 2 bsd users 0 2011-12-11 09:06 foo
54996 -rw-r--r-- 2 bsd users 0 2011-12-11 09:06 foolink

If I edit either foo or foolink there is only one file and it will be updated. If I remove only one of the filenames, the inode and data will persist, foolink will survive.

$ rm foo
$ ls -li foo foolink
ls: cannot access foo: No such file or directory
54996 -rw-r--r-- 1 bsd users 0 2011-12-11 09:06 foolink

---

If I were to create the same, but with a "soft" or symbolic link, then There's one file, one inode, and a new file with its own inode pointing to the first.

$ touch foo
$ ln -s foo foolink # Create symlink
$ ls -li foo foolink
55029 -rw-r--r-- 1 bsd users 0 2011-12-11 09:11 foo
55033 lrwxrwxrwx 1 bsd users 3 2011-12-11 09:11 foolink -> foo

If I edit either foo or foolink there is still only one file and it will be updated.

If I remove only the symlink, the inode and data will persist. If I remove foo, the data will be gone, the symlink will persist but point to a non-existent file.

$ rm foo
removed `foo'
$ ls -l foo foolink 
ls: cannot access foo: No such file or directory
lrwxrwxrwx 1 bsd bsd 3 2011-12-11 09:11 foolink -> foo

Answer 7

A hard link will keep a file on disk until all hard links to it, even the first (a "filename" is technically a hard link), have been deleted. A soft link can be left "dangling" until the file it point(s/ed) to is replaced.