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Creating symbolic links

Creating symbolic links - Unix Tutorial

From the course: Unix Essential Training

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Creating symbolic links

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- [Instructor] In this movie, we're going to learn about something called symbolic links. Symbolic links are also called sym links for short. And they're similar to the shortcuts or aliases that you might have used before in a graphical user interface. The idea is that we create an object that refers to an object somewhere else in the file system. The way that we create a sym link in Unix is with the ln command. ln short for link. It's very important that you use the dash s option with ln. That's what creates the symbolic link. If you leave that off it creates something called a hard link. And that works very differently, and it's rarely used. So rarely we're not even going to talk about it here. We're just going to focus on the much more common and much more useful symbolic links. So ln with the dash s option, followed by a path to the target file, and then the path to the sym link that we want to create. There's…

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