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- Cloud

Working with Links in Linux
Understanding how soft and hard links work within Linux is another important skill for a system administrator. This learning activity will help you practice creating these two types of links on a file system, and explore the differences between the two.

Lab Info
Table of Contents
-
Challenge
Create a Symbolic (soft) Link
Using the
ln
command, create a symbolic link from the file/etc/redhat-release
to a new link file namedrelease
in thecloud_user
's home directory. Using thels
command, verify that the link is valid. Use thecat
command on the/home/cloud_user/release
file to verify its contents.Can be completed with:
ln -s /etc/redhat-release release
ls -l
cat /etc/redhat-release
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Challenge
Check the Inode Numbers for the Link
Using the
ls
command, first look at the inode number for the/home/cloud_user/release
link and then check the inode number for/etc/redhat-release
. They should be different, as the symbolic link is just a new file system entry that references the original file.Viewing the inodes can be done via:
ls -i release
ls -i /etc/redhat-release
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Challenge
Create a Hard Link
Create a directory called
docs
in your home directory. Copy the/etc/services
file into this newdocs
directory. Using theln
command again, create a hard link from/home/cloud_user/docs/services
to a link file named/home/cloud_user/services
. Use thels
command to verify the link's inode number, and the inode number for the original/etc/services
file.The commands to accomplish this task are:
mkdir docs
cp /etc/services docs/
ln docs/services services
ls -l
ls -i services
ls -i docs/services
-
Challenge
Attempt to Create a Hard Link Across File Systems
Using the
ln
command, attempt to make a hard link from/home/cloud_user/docs/services
to/opt/services
(you will have write permissions to this location). Why does this not work?To see the behavior of this task, try the following:
lsblk
ln docs/services /opt/services
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Challenge
Attempt to Create a Symbolic Link Across File Systems
Once more using the
ln
command, attempt to create a soft link from/etc/redhat-release
to/opt/release
. Why does this work, but creating a hard link fails? Turn the system over for grading when complete.Creating the soft link should succeed, even across filesystems, like so:
sudo ln -s /etc/redhat-release /opt/release
ls -i /etc/redhat-release
ls -i /opt/release
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