Overview

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create symbolic links in Linux. We can use the ln command to create hard links and symbolic links.

A link in Linux is a pointer to a file. The pointer associates the filename with an inode number. There are two kinds of links:

• Hard Links
• Symbolic/Soft Links

 Create a Symbolic link

To create a symbolic link to the file “sample.txt”, use
the following command:

$ ln -s sample.txt symlink_name

symlink_name is the symbolic link to the file. We can replace this with another name. In the example, we have created a symbolic link called ‘slink’ to the file ‘sample.txt’

Notice that the file and the symbolic link have different inode numbers.

We can also create a symbolic link to a directory on Linux. For example,

$ ln -s target_dir link_dir

That’s it.