Symbolic links (also known as symlinks or soft links) are one of two types of links that you can create on a Linux system. If you’re just now learning about symbolic links, it may help to think of them as “shortcuts,” a term commonly used by Windows systems to represent basically the same thing.
Symbolic links are used to link to hard links. If you’re interested in learning more about hard links and how they compare to symbolic links, check our guide on creating hard and soft links. Suffice it to say that symlinks are just entries in the file system that point to files or directories. They’re mostly used for convenience.
In this guide, we’ll run through the step by step instructions of creating and removing symbolic links. You can follow along with our examples below on your own command line to get a feel for how they work.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to create and remove symbolic links
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