UNIX filesystem features

• Modern filesystems contain features you may not be used to – most notably, links.

• Any “file” is actually a combination of data and metadata.

• Metadata describes and locates the file using an inode.

• Data is the contents of the file itself.

• A “hard link” is an extra inode which points to the same data as the original inode. The actual data will not be deleted until the last hard link is removed.

• A “soft link” or “symlink” points to the file by pathname, not by inode. If you remove a file, a symlink pointing to that file will do nothing.