symlink.4 (2010 09)

symlink(4) symlink(4)

NAME

symlink - symbolic link

DESCRIPTION

A symbolic (or soft ) link is a ﬁle whose name indirectly refers (points) to a relative or absolute path

name.

During path name interpretation, a symbolic link to a relative path name is expanded to the path name

being interpreted, and a symbolic link to an absolute path name is replaced with the path name being

interpreted.

Thus, given the path name

/a/b/c/d:

c is a symbolic link to a relative path name such as

../x/y, the path name is interpreted as

/a/b/../x/y/d.

c is a symbolic link to an absolute path name such as

/v/w, the path name is interpreted as

/v/w/d.

All symbolic links are interpreted in this manner, with one exception: when the symbolic link is the last

component of a path name, it is passed as a parameter to one of the system calls:

readlink, rename,

symlink, unlink, chown,or lstat

(see readlink (2), rename(2), symlink (2), unlink (2), chown (2) and

lstat (2)). With these calls, the symbolic link, itself, is accessed or affected.

Unlike normal (hard) links, a symbolic link can refer to any arbitrary path name and can span different

logical devices (volumes).

The path name can be that of any type of ﬁle (including a directory or another symbolic link), and may be

invalid if no such path exists in the system. (It is possible to make symbolic links point to themselves or

other symbolic links in such a way that they form a closed loop. The system detects this situation by lim-

iting the number of symbolic links it traverses while translating a path name.)

The mode and ownership of a symbolic link is ignored by the system, which means that

chmod

affects

the actual ﬁle, but not the ﬁle containing the symbolic link (see chmod(1)).

Symbolic links can be created using

ln or symlink (see ln(1) and symlink (2)).

AUTHOR

symlink was developed by HP and the University of California, Berkeley.

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symlink(4) symlink(4) NAME symlink - symbolic link DESCRIPTION A symbolic (or soft ) link is a file whose name indirectly refers (points) to a relative or absolute path name. During path name interpretation, a symbolic link to a relative path name is expanded to the path name being interpreted, and a symbolic link to an absolute path name is replaced with the path name being interpreted. Thus, given the path name /a/b/c/d: If c is a symbolic link to a relative path name such as ..
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(Notes) A (Notes) sA 2 Hewlett-Packard Company −1− HP-UX 11i Version 3: September 2010