Adam,
The other answers handled the technical part pretty well, but for the
practical, here's my take.
SYMLINKS - good for making aliases. Also good for revealing themselves
with "find -l". Useful when you want to maintain distinct timestamps on
link and target (think scheduled jobs as a dir of symlinks, with the
link's create date as the last run time). At their best use with
anything related to configuration management.
HARDLINKS - good for making both pointers equally permanent. Great for
"time-machine" style backups (recursive copy a folder as hardlinks, then
delete/upload changed files only via rsync ... Each dir holds only
changed files, but still represents a perfect set)
That's my practical view on them. Hope that helps.
Sp
On Thu, 8 Jul 2010 10:15 pm, Adam wrote:
I understand the difference between hard links and symlinks, but don't
(yet) see where anyone would want to use a hard link instead of a
symlink. In what situations would a hard link be better or more
appropriate? Thanks in advance for any clarification on this!
Adam
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(321)698-7987
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Aug 4 - Samba
Sep 1 - BOINC
Oct 6 - Creating Firefox Extensions
