NAME
symlink — symbolic link
DESCRIPTION
A
symbolic
(or
soft
) link is a file whose name
indirectly refers (points) to a relative or absolute path name.
During path name interpretation,
a symbolic link to a relative path name is expanded to
the path name being interpreted, and a symbolic link to
an absolute path name
is replaced with the path name being interpreted.
Thus, given the path name
/a/b/c/d:
If
c
is a symbolic link to a relative path name such as
../x/y,
the path name is interpreted as
/a/b/../x/y/d.
If
c
is a symbolic link to an absolute path name such as
/v/w,
the path name is interpreted as
/v/w/d.
All symbolic links are interpreted in this manner,
with one exception:
when the symbolic link is the last component of a path name,
it is passed as a parameter to one of the system calls:
readlink,
rename,
symlink,
unlink,
chown,
or
lstat
(see
readlink(2),
rename(2),
symlink(2),
unlink(2),
chown(2)
and
lstat(2)).
With these calls, the symbolic link, itself, is accessed or affected.
Unlike normal (hard) links,
a symbolic link can refer to any arbitrary path name
and can span different logical devices (volumes).
The path name can be that of any type of file
(including a directory or another symbolic link),
and may be invalid if no such path exists in the system.
(It is possible to make symbolic links point to themselves
or other symbolic links in such a way that they form a closed loop.
The system detects this situation by limiting the number of symbolic links
it traverses while translating a path name.)
The mode and ownership of a symbolic link is ignored by the system,
which means that
chmod
affects the actual file, but not the file containing the symbolic link (see
chmod(1)).
Symbolic links can be created using
ln
or
symlink
(see
ln(1)
and
symlink(2)).
AUTHOR
symlink
was developed by HP and the University of California, Berkeley.
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