What is a symbolic link ?

symbolic links or "symbolic links" is what we know in windows as shortcuts only for specific environments in * nix like Mac and Linux. There are two types of soft and hard symbolic links, let's look at the following diagram to illustrate the differences:

As seen in the "diagram", a hard link refers to the address in memory where the file is located, while the soft link refers to the name of the file which eventually leads to the address in memory. The important thing to conclude from this is if we change the name of the original file, any soft links that refer to it would stop working while hard links would continue as usual because they point directly to memory.

A hard link is specifically assigning a second file name to existing content, the file content only exists once on hard drive

$ ln File.txt hard-link

by default the ln command creates a hard link

$ ln -s File.txt soft-link

with the -s flag we create a soft link