link invocation (GNU Coreutils 9.0)
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12.1 link: Make a hard link via the link syscall
link
creates a single hard link at a time. It is a minimalist interface to the system-provided link
function. See Hard Links in The GNU C Library Reference Manual. It avoids the bells and whistles of the more commonly-used ln
command (see ln invocation). Synopsis:
link filename linkname
filename
must specify an existing file, and linkname
must specify a nonexistent entry in an existing directory. link
simply calls link (filename, linkname)
to create the link.
On a GNU system, this command acts like ‘ln --directory --no-target-directory filename linkname
’. However, the --directory
and --no-target-directory
options are not specified by POSIX, and the link
command is more portable in practice.
If filename
is a symbolic link, it is unspecified whether linkname
will be a hard link to the symbolic link or to the target of the symbolic link. Use ln -P
or ln -L
to specify which behavior is desired.
An exit status of zero indicates success, and a nonzero value indicates failure.