Symbolic links are really useful. They allow us
to define aliases for files and directories. For example,
suppose I've developed the
extremely useful hw utility ---
~/research/helloworldV1/hw*
--- and I want to put make it available in ~/bin.
If I copy hw from ~/research/helloworldV1/
into ~/bin, and then go back and recompile it later,
what's in ~/bin will be out of date. So instead I
define a symbolic link
bash$ cd ~/bin
bash$ ln ../research/helloworldV1/hw hw
... and now ~/bin/hw always refers to
the current version of
~/research/helloworldV1/hw*.
How are symbolic links represented (i.e. in terms of
inodes and directory blocks and data blocks) on the
actual drive?