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Next, let's discuss another aspect of file management—links. Sometimes, you'll need 
to link one thing to another, and there are a few ways to go about that along with 
some best-practice advice.
Using symbolic and hard links
If you've used a graphical operating system for more than a week, you're probably 
more than familiar with the concept of shortcuts. Either on the desktop or within 
a menu, you will have shortcuts to files and applications. This can be a shortcut to 
your home or profile directory, a shortcut to an application, an individual file, and so 
on. We have the same concept in Linux.
With Linux, we can link files to other files, which gives us the ability to create our 
own shortcuts, which are effectively similar to shortcuts in graphical operating 
systems, but without the requirement of a GUI. This comes in the form of 
symbolic
 
and 
hard
 links, which are two different methods in which we can link things. 
Symbolic and hard links are very similar, but to explain
 them, you'll first need to 
understand the concept of 
inodes
.
An inode is a data object that contains metadata regarding files within your 
filesystem. Although a full walkthrough of the concept of inodes is beyond the scope 
of this book, think of an inode as a type of database object, containing metadata for 
the actual items you're storing on your disk. Information stored in inodes includes 
details such as the owner of the file, permissions, last modified date, and type 
(whether it is a directory or a file). Inodes are represented by an integer number, 
which you can view with the 
-i
 option of the 
ls
 command. On my system, I created 
two files: 
file1
 and 
file2
. These files are inodes 
529037
 and 
530967
, respectively. 
You can see this output in the following screenshot where I run the 
ls -i
 command. 
This information will come in handy shortly:
Figure 5.8: Output of ls -i
As I mentioned earlier, there are two types of links in Linux: symbolic links and 
hard links. While the two types of links approach the concept differently, they 
pretty much serve the same purpose. Basically, a link allows us to reference a file 
somewhere else on our filesystem.

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Managing Files and Directories