Command Line: Symbolic Links aka Symlinks

This week the buzz in CLI Magic is all about symbolic links. As you can tell from the name, symbolic links are not real links, and their behavior reflects that. Using symbolic links lets you more easily do all sorts of neat things, not the least of which is to satisfy dependency issues for needy applications. But before we get into that, we'll go over the basics. You need to understand both inodes and real links in order to grok symbolic links.