The difference between the link and ln commands

hard linkln

From the man pages:

ln - make links between files

and

link - call the link function to create a link to a file

These seem to do the same thing however ln takes a lot of options as well.

Is link just a very basic ln? Is there any reason to use link over ln?

Best Answer

link used solely for hard links, calls the link() system function and doesn't perform error checking when attempting to create the link

ln has error checking and can create hard and soft links

Related Solutions

Way to express: `–link` or fall back to ordinary copy in cp (from GNU coreutils)

cp doesn't have this option. You could write a wrapper script, but it's pretty simple.

ln -f $^ $@ 2>/dev/null || cp -f $^ $@

GNU Coreutils 7.5 introduced the --reflink option. If you pass --reflink=auto and the underlying filesystem supports copy-on-write (e.g. Btrfs or ZFS) and the copy happens to be on the same device, then cp will create a new inode but not copy the content; otherwise cp performs a normal copy. This is still not a hard link (the target will always be a different inode), but it's probably even better for your use case. However, if you're on ext4 (like most people nowadays), which doesn't support copy-on-write, this won't help you.

Shell Hard Link – Forcibly Create Directory Hard Links

Don't do this. If you want to have a backup system using hard links to save space, better to use rsync with --link-dest, which will hard link files appropriately to save space, without causing the problems that this causes (that is, hard linking between directories is a corruption of the filesystem, and will cause it to report wrong inode counts + fail fsck + generally have unknown semantics due to not being a DAG).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Way to express: `–link` or fall back to ordinary copy in cp (from GNU coreutils)

Shell Hard Link – Forcibly Create Directory Hard Links

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