If you delete the soft link itself (sales.data.txt) , the data file would still be there ( /shared/sales/data/file.txt ). However, if you delete /shared/sales/data/file.txt, sales.data.txt becomes a broken link and data is lost.
How do I delete a hard link?
If you delete a hard link, your data would be there. If you delete /tmp/file your data still be accessible via link-here hard link file.
See how to create a hard links in Linux / UNIX for more information.
I am trying to create a hard link to PHP file after installation of PHP4 as a CGI .
I could never get the order of the two things in “ln -s X Y” right, and ended up clobbering Ys with dangling links to X. So I wrote this little sanity-checker wrapper around it: lns.
It does stuff like making sure that your link won’t overwrite anything, and that it’s a link to something that already exists. Just common sense, but sense that I didn’t have.
If you want to create a symbolic link for multiple files under one directory e.g. want to have all jar files of java to ant lib you can use this feature of linux. This will solve your purpose as well as save the space with reduced redundancy.
Here is a youtube comment I made based on solving a lua-5.2.3 update issue on CentOS 6.5. The issue here is that your symbolic link tutorial was the key to solving my update issue with lua-5.2.3.
Since this latest .rpm is still lua-5.1.4 yum install didn’t do an update. Hope this is of help to some.