title: What are hardlinks on UNIX? How do they vary from copies?
body: <p>I'm trying to get a basic understanding of the concept of "Hard and Soft Links" in Linux.<br>
  I came across several links online, and they all said that one must get an understanding of the Unix file-system before understanding what hard and soft links are.<br>
  I will first write what I got so far, mainly for you to correct me if I'm wrong...(I'm aware that I might over simplify things, this is for the sake of... well... simplifying things):  </p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Every file (or folder) on a Unix file-system is identified not by its name, but by a <strong>number</strong> that represents a data-structure called an <em>inode</em>.</li>
  <li>The inode contains information about the file it refers to, like permissions, size, location on the disk and more...</li>
  <li>A directory (folder) in a Unix file-system, is actually no more than a <strong>list</strong>; a <em>name-to-inode#</em> mapping, of the files it contains. this means, that a file-name is separated from the file-content (the actual data on the disk).  </li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>So we could have something like this:<br>
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/lKplb.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>I also read, and this is where I get confused, that the name-inode map for a file isn't necessarily unique, meaning that a directory can contain two different file names that maps to the same inode number (and thus to the same file in the file system, and thus to the same actual content data on the disk), <strong>and</strong> two different directories may contain identical name-inode mappings (how is it different from "coping a folder with all its content"?) so using either pathname will lead to the same actual content on disk... How exactly can you name a file with two different names on linux, and what is it good for anyway?</p>
  
  <p>btw, is there some linux tool that shows the information for a given inode?</p>