I've read in so many websites that, in Linux, symbolic links (soft links, symlinks) are just like pointers that reference another file, which may be located anywhere (like Windows shortcuts). However, when I check the disk usage of a folder in which there are symbolic links, there's a mismatch between what my file manager says and what du
reports. However, if I type du -L
(-L, --dereference; dereference all symbolic links
from the man page), the output of du -L
and the size that my file manager reports are the same.
My question is: if I have a softlink to a big file in, for example, my separate home
partition, will I have any problems?
Example:
My /var/tmp
folder is now plain empty. Let's create a file:
$ cat /some/file.txt > file.txt
$ du -ac
164 ./file.txt
168 .
168 total
And my file manager (Thunar, in this case) reports
Size: 1 item, totalling 163.0 kB
All right. Now, lets create a really big file in /tmp
and a symlink to it:
$ cat /dir/really_big.txt > /tmp/heavy.txt
$ du -a | grep heavy.txt
408 ./heavy.txt
$ ln -s /tmp/heavy.txt heavy.txt
$ du -ac
164 ./file.txt
0 ./heavy.txt
168 .
168 total
Everything is fine for now. But if I open my file manager:
Size: 2 items, totalling 570.3 kB
And, finally:
$ du -acL
164 ./file.txt
408 ./heavy.txt
576 .
576 total
If the partition in which /var/tmp
is located is 1 GiB big, and I create a link in it to a 1 GiB file, ¿will my hard disk die? I know that du
will output 168 and Thunar 1 GiB, but I don't know which is right.