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For a practical example, let's create a hard link. In my case, I have a couple of files in 
a 
test
 directory, so I can create a link to any of them. To create a link, we'll use the 
ln
 
command:
ln file1 file3
Here, I'm creating a hard link (
file3
) that is linked to 
file1
. To play around with 
this, go ahead and create a link to a file on your system. If we use 
ls
 again with the 
-i
 option, we'll see something interesting:
Figure 5.9: Output of second ls -I command
If you look closely at the output, both 
file1
 and 
file3
 have the same inode number. 
Essentially, a hard link is a duplicate directory entry, where both entries point to the 
same data. In this case, we created a hard link that points to another file. With this 
hard link created, we can move 
file3
 into another location on the filesystem and it 
will still be a link to 
file1
. Hard links have a couple of limitations, however. First, 
you cannot create a hard link to a directory, only a file. Second, this link cannot be 
moved to a different filesystem. That makes sense, considering each filesystem has its 
own inodes. Inode 
529037
 on my system would, of course, not point to the same file 
on another system, if this inode number even exists at all.
To overcome these limitations, we can consider using a soft link instead. A soft 
link (also known as