Link Commands (Demo)
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Course
Difficulty
Intermediate
Video Transcription
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>> Hello, Cybrarians.
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Welcome back to the Linux+ course here at Cybrary.
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I'm your instructor Rob Gels.
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In today's lesson, we're going to be
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talking about link commands.
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Now upon completion of today's lesson,
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you're going to be able to understand inodes and
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symbolic and hard links and
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the relationship between all of those.
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We're going to use the lm command to create
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symbolic and hard links and we're going to
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learn how we can use the unlink command.
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Every Linux file has a name,
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data blocks, and an index number
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which is known as an inode.
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Linux uses the inode number when it's
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trying to access the file and the file is
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assigned a unique inode by
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the file system anytime a file is created.
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A hard link has just one index number,
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but it has two different files
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pointing to that index number to that inode.
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Both file names just point
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this same inode on this system.
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That is essentially a look
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here at what the hard link looks like.
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Filesystem has one inode.
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We have File 1 and File 2 pointed to it.
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A symlink by comparison,
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which is also known as soft link or a symbolic link,
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points to another file with its own inode.
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This file actually holds the data in question.
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We have File 1 with inode number, whatever,
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and that actually holds the data,
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and then File 2 is just a symbolic link
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that points to that file.
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It tells you, hey, go to this file
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to get actually actual data.
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This is just a pointer to where that file lives.
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These files both have their own inode number.
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Let's do a little bit of a review here.
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We're going to compare these side-by-side in hard links,
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both files share the same inode number.
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In soft links, that data file has
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one inode number and
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symlink has a different inode number.
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In hard links, both links share the same data because
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remember they're just pointing to the exact same inode.
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In soft links the data file
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and symlink do not share the data.
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The symlink is just a pointer to
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the actual data that lives in the data file.
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In hard links, both files
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have to be on the same file system,
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when you're using a soft link or a symlink,
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files can be on different file systems.
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You can have the data file
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on one file system and then you can
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symlink to where that data is
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located from a different file system.
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In hard links, if you delete the hard link,
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it deletes all of
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the files and all of the data. It's gone.
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In soft links, you can delete the symlink,
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the link that's pointed to
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the actual data file and not delete the data file,
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it just removes the link.
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That might just be about as clear as mud.
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Why don't we take a look at this a little
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closer with some demo time.
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Here we are back over in our CentOS environment,
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do some demo work and just
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understand to do some links are
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hardly as we actually use the same command.
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It's just ln, It's really easy.
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The ln command is used to create links.
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To create a hard link where we can do,
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first of all is make sure that we're in
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my home directory here.
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Let's mess around with the Ubuntu
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file that we have right here.
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If we're going to create a hard link for this,
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we can do an ln Ubuntu file
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and we're going to create a hard link to this.
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We'll create a link called
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Ubuntu file and we'll give it the number two.
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Now if we do an ls, we see
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Ubuntu file and Ubuntu file 2 right here.
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Now, if we want to,
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we can see the inode numbers for these
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by using the -i option.
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We're going to do a long listing so
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>> ls -il to see the inode number.
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>> Do ls -il and we want to do that on
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all Ubuntu file star.
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All of Ubuntu files.
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We can see that they both share the same inode number,
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that's this number here at the beginning, 137.
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Now if we want to create a soft link,
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we use the ln command, but
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it's just a little bit different.
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We have to use the -s option.
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S is for soft link or symlink
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or just essentially a soft link to get to this file.
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If we wanted to symlink back to that same file,
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we could do an ln -s on Ubuntu file.
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We'll say that we want this file to be called symlink.
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Now if we run an ls -il on the Ubuntu files,
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we see that they have the inode number of 137,
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but if we run an ls -il on the same link file,
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we see that it has an unknown number of 138.
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The symlink, which is this,
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and the source file which is this,
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have different inode numbers.
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We can also see that this symlink shows an arrow
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pointing to the Ubuntu file
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because it's really all same like this.
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It's just a pointer to where the data actually lives,
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and this shows the relationship between the two files.
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The symlink points to the actual data file.
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Now if we wanted to remove a symlink,
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we just simply delete it.
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We do rm symlink and it's gone.
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If you run an ls -il,
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it's not there anymore because it's not in the system.
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But if we wanted to remove
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this association between these hardlinks that we have,
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we actually have to use another command called unlink.
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If we just start removing files,
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things can happen very badly
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because they're all pointing to the same file.
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If I were to remove Ubuntu file or Ubuntu file 2,
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it's removing the same inodes
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>> both of them get impacted.
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>> If we wanted to remove Ubuntu files 2,
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that hard link without impacting Ubuntu file,
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we use the command unlink,
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and we just type unlink Ubuntu file 2,
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>> and then hit "Enter".
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>> Now when we run the ls -il command,
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we only have Ubuntu file.
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Ubuntu file 2 has been removed and we can
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do an ls and see that that's not there.
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We just have Ubuntu file no more of Ubuntu file 2.
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But with that, we've reached end of this lesson and in
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this lesson we covered the relationship between inodes,
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hard links and symbolic links.
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We also talked about linking and unlinking
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files using ln and unlink respectively.
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Thank you so much for being here and I look
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forward to seeing you in our next lesson.
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