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Cake day: November 23rd, 2023

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  • No. Symlinks and hardlinks are two approaches to creating a “pointer to a file.” They are quite different in implementation, but at the high level:

    • Symlinks can point to other filesystems, hardlinks only work on the same filesystem.
    • You can delete the target of a symlink (or even create one that points at nothing), but a hardlink always points to a real file.

    In both cases, the only additional data used is the metadata used for the link itself. The contents of the file on disk are not copied.