What is the size of a symbolic link?
Symbolic Links to Files in a Different Directory This time, the symbolic link’s file size is no longer 4 bytes. Rather, it’s 10 : the length of the string links/ (which is 6 ) plus the length of the target file name itself ( 4 ).
How do I follow a symbolic link?
In order to follow symbolic links, you must specify ls -L or provide a trailing slash. For example, ls -L /etc and ls /etc/ both display the files in the directory that the /etc symbolic link points to. Other shell commands that have differences due to symbolic links are du, find, pax, rm and tar.
Which is an example of a symbolic link?
You can use a symbolic link, for example, to provide a path to a file that will be added or replaced later. Also unlike a hard link, a symbolic link can cross file systems. For example, if you are working in one file system, you can use a symbolic link to access a file in another file system.
How to create symbolic link to target file from link name?
To create a symbolic link to target file from link name, you can use the ln command with -s option like this: The -s option is important here. It determines that the link is soft link. If you don’t use it, it will create a hard link. I’ll explain the difference between soft links and hard links in a different article.
What does the ” size ” of a symlink?
If the symlink doesn’t fit, space is allocated normally (so you end up with a single block allocation), which may be optimized by the filesystem using tail merging (but there is no API for du to know about this). The ext4 filesystem performs this optimization for symlinks only, the criteria are found in the function ext4_inode_is_fast_symlink.
How big is a symbolic link on ext4?
It’s 7 on ext4, but could be 13 on btrfs and 3 on tmpfs. – muru Jun 1 ’15 at 16:30 It is a size, but the size depends on the filesystem (btrfs presumably stores more metadata than ext4, and ext4 more than tmpfs). You can fill your disk with links.