Symlinks vs Hardlinks: Choosing the Right One

Developers use symlinks and hardlinks interchangeably without understanding the constraints, leading to broken links after moves or across filesystems.

Use symlinks for cross-filesystem links or directories. Use hardlinks for same-filesystem file deduplication.

# Symlink (soft link) — can cross filesystems, can link directories
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/myapp /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/myapp

# Check symlink target
readlink -f /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/myapp

# Hardlink — same filesystem only, shares inode
ln /var/data/large-file.bin /var/backup/large-file.bin

# Find all hardlinks sharing an inode
find /var -inum $(stat -c '%i' /var/data/large-file.bin)

# Find broken symlinks
find /etc/nginx/sites-enabled -xtype l

Hardlinks share an inode — deleting one does not remove the data until all links are gone. Symlinks are just path pointers — if the target moves, the symlink breaks. Hardlinks cannot span filesystems or link to directories.