Hard links and soft links!

whats the difference between hard links and soft ones, i always have wondered about this but havent ever found out what it is?


On a seperate note,
type
"I'ld like to kill bill gates" is MS Word 98 if you have that version, then check what the thesauris says for it, its funny,

it says
"i'll drink to that !"

Lol, hahaha! In Word 2000 it says "I'd imagine" or something to that effect. Not that Im fond of that.

Cheers,
Joe of 4Life

Quoting from a tutorial on my site:

Soft (or symbolic) links will also allow you to link accross different files systems (partions, disks, or networked machines).

hard links dont copy the information but it is still available after the target is deleted? how is this possible?
by saying copying im referring to the bit you said about not taking up any extra space....
what if you shred the target file? or set the file attribute chattr +s so that it gets perm deleted? does hard linking work its way around this?

what is Word98? i only know of Word97 and the successor was Word2000, no? still very funny

I think of you shred the file it deletes both the file and the hard link. I'm not certain about this, so people correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it works like so: when you create the file, the data is written to the hard drive, and a pointer is put to that data in the filesystem. When you do a hard link, another pointer is put to that data. When you delete, you must just delete the pointer, and the data is overwritten later. Shredding, I assume, will delete the pointer *and* the data.

if its not 98, it might be 97, its been ages since i looked at it.