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Symbolic link, also know as a Symlink or soft link. Is a kind of shortcut that point to a specific file or directory.
There are two types of links in Linux/UNIX systems:
The *ln* command syntax for creating symbolic links is as follows:
ln -s [OPTIONS] FILE LINK
To create a symbolic link to a given file, run:
ln -s source_file symbolic_link
The symbolic_link parameter is optional. If you do not specify the symbolic link, the ln command will create a new link in your current directory:
To create a symbolic link to a directory is the same as when creating a symbolic link to a file, run:
ln -s /mnt/my_drive/anime ~/Videos/anime
If you try to create a symbolic link that already exists, the ln command will print an error message.
ln -s my_file.txt my_link.txt ln: failed to create symbolic link 'my_link.txt': File exists
To overwrite the destination path of the symlink, use the -f (--force) option.
ln -sf my_file.txt my_link.txt
To verify that the symlink was successfully created, use the *ls* command:
ls -l
The output will look something like this:
my_link.txt -> my_file.txt
To delete/remove symbolic links use either the unlink or rm command. The syntax is simple:
unlink symlink_to_remove
Removing a symbolic link using the rm command:
rm symlink_to_remove
No matter which command you use, when removing a symbolic link not append the / trailing slash at the end of its name.
If you delete or move the source file to a different location, the symbolic file will be left broken and should be removed.
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