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From: J G Miller on 21 Feb 2010 09:17
As the topic of hard and symbolic links has come up, I would like to ask
the following question which has been bothering me for many years.

To the best of my knowledge, it was traditionally the case that in the
System V startup directories, rc0.d ... rc6.d, the startup and
shutdown scripts S0.. and K0.. were HARD links to the scripts in
/etc/init.d

Now in all the GNU/Linux systems I have seen, these have always been
symbolic links.

Why do GNU/Linux systems use symbolic links and not hard links?

And does it make any difference?
From: John Hasler on 21 Feb 2010 11:05
J. G. Miller writes:
> To the best of my knowledge, it was traditionally the case that in the
> System V startup directories, rc0.d ... rc6.d, the startup and
> shutdown scripts S0.. and K0.. were HARD links to the scripts in
> /etc/init.d

> Now in all the GNU/Linux systems I have seen, these have always been
> symbolic links.

Symlinks are a Berkeley invention. They were eventually added to SysV
but the sysvinit links were left hard. Linux had symlinks from the
beginning.

> And does it make any difference?

Symlinks are more flexible. For example, I can delete a script and then
replace it with a new one of the same name and not have to mess with the
links.
--
John Hasler
jhasler(a)newsguy.com
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI USA
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