Soft Vs Hard link

Soft links:

As shown in the diagram soft links or symbolic links simply points to another file. It only contains the pathname of the file to which it is pointing.

Soft links

Example:

# touch file1
# ln -s file1 link1
# ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1   root   root  0  Sep  19  14:41  link1
lrwxrwxrwx 1   root   root  5  Sep  19  15:41  link1 -> file1

Hard links:

Every file uses atleast one hard link. So when you create a new file a new directory entry is created which is called link count. So when you create a new hard link to this file the link count increaments by 1.

Hard links

Example:

# touch file1
# ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1  root  root  0  Sep  23  13:19  file1
# ln file1 file2
# ls -l
-rw-r--r--  2  root  root  0  Sep  23  13:19  file1
-rw-r--r--  2  root  root  0  Sep  23  13:19  file2
# ls -li
1282  -rw-r--r--  2  root  0  root  0  Sep  23  13:19  file1
1282  -rw-r--r--  2  root  0  root  0  Sep  23  13:19  file2
# find . -inum 1282
./file1
./file2

Diagrammatic representation:

Diagrammatic representation