The filesystem on macOS (HFS+) does not support hard links to symbolic links:
$ touch file
$ ls -l file
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk staff 0 Jun 17 18:35 file
$ ln -s file slink
$ ls -l file slink
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk staff 0 Jun 17 18:35 file
lrwxr-xr-x 1 kk staff 4 Jun 17 18:36 slink -> file
The following would ordinarily create a hard link to a symbolic link, and is even documented in the ln
manual on macOS to do so (EDIT: no it isn't, unless you have GNU coreutils installed and read the wrong manual, doh!):
$ ln -P slink hlink
$ ls -l file slink hlink
-rw-r--r-- 1 kk staff 0 Jun 17 18:35 file
lrwxr-xr-x 1 kk staff 4 Jun 17 18:38 hlink -> file
lrwxr-xr-x 1 kk staff 4 Jun 17 18:36 slink -> file
You can see by the ref count (1) that no new name was created for slink
(would have been 2 for both slink
and hlink
if it had worked). Also, stat
tells us that hlink
is a symbolic link with 1 inode link (not 2):
$ stat hlink
File: 'hlink' -> 'file'
Size: 4 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 4096 symbolic link
Device: 1000004h/16777220d Inode: 83828644 Links: 1
Access: (0755/lrwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 501/ kk) Gid: ( 20/ staff)
Access: 2016-06-17 18:38:18.000000000 +0200
Modify: 2016-06-17 18:38:18.000000000 +0200
Change: 2016-06-17 18:38:18.000000000 +0200
Birth: 2016-06-17 18:38:18.000000000 +0200
EDIT: Since I was caught using GNU coreutils, here's the tests again with /bin/ln
on macOS:
$ touch file
$ /bin/ln -s file slink
$ /bin/ln slink hlink # there is no option corresponding to GNU's -P
$ ls -l file slink hlink
-rw-r--r-- 2 kk staff 0 Jun 17 18:59 file
-rw-r--r-- 2 kk staff 0 Jun 17 18:59 hlink
lrwxr-xr-x 1 kk staff 4 Jun 17 18:59 slink -> file
The hard link is pointing to file
rather than to slink
.
On e.g. Linux and OpenBSD (the other OSes I use), it is possible to do this, which results in
$ ls -l file slink hlink
-rw-rw-r-- 1 kk kk 0 Jun 17 18:35 file
lrwxrwxrwx 2 kk kk 4 Jun 17 18:43 hlink -> file
lrwxrwxrwx 2 kk kk 4 Jun 17 18:43 slink -> file
(notice "2")
--copy-links
option is probably what you want.--copy-links
option copies the files to which the links point (which is as close as OP will get to what was intended).