I’ve seen many explanations for why the link count for an empty directory in Unix based OSes is 2 instead of 1. They all say that it’s because of the ‘.’ directory, which every directory has pointing back to itself. I understand why having some concept of ‘.’ is useful for specifying relative paths, but what is gained by implementing it at the filesystem level? Why not just have shells or the system calls that take paths know how to interpret it?
I’m getting a permissions error in CentOS 7 when I try to create a hard link. With the same permissions set in CentOS 6 I do not get the error. The issue centers on group permissions. I’m not sure which OS version is right and which is wrong.
When I stat a directory I get a listing that tell me there are 5 links to the directory.
If you do rm myFile where myFile is a hard link, what happens?
How to move directories that have files in common from one to another partition ?
I’m trying to understand what cp --preserve=links does when used by itself, from my tests it seems that it copies a normal file normally and dereferences symlinks, but it seems like it just has the same effect as cp -L when used on a single file.
This answer reveals that one can copy all files – including hidden ones – from directory src into directory dest like so:
A hard link is defined as a pointer to an inode. A soft link, also known as a symbolic link, is defined as an independent file pointing to another link without the restrictions of hard links.
A question for ls command.
I am reading this intro to the command line by Mark Bates.