Symbolic links are supported by POSIX and by most Unix-like operating systems, such as FreeBSD, Linux, and macOS.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,910 |
12 Facts About Symbolic links
1.
2.
SymSymbolic links were already present by 1978 in minicomputer operating systems from DEC, and in Data General's RDOS.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,911 |
3.
Symbolic links link contains a text string that is automatically interpreted and followed by the operating system as a path to another file or directory.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,912 |
4.
Symbolic links pointing to moved or non-existing targets are sometimes called broken, orphaned, dead, or dangling.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,913 |
5.
Symbolic links operate transparently for many operations: programs that read or write to files named by a symbolic link will behave as if operating directly on the target file.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,914 |
6.
Early implementations of symbolic links stored the symbolic link information as data in regular files.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,915 |
7.
An improvement, called fast symSymbolic links, allowed storage of the target path within the data structures used for storing file information on disk.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,916 |
8.
Systems with fast symSymbolic links often fall back to using the original method if the target path exceeds the available inode space.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,917 |
9.
Only when a link points to a file in the same directory do "fast symSymbolic links" provide significantly better performance than other symSymbolic links.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,918 |
10.
Symbolic links are designed to aid in migration and application compatibility with POSIX operating systems.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,919 |
12.
Pyramid Technology's OSx Operating System implemented conditional symbolic links which pointed to different locations depending on which universe a program was running in.
| FactSnippet No. 1,632,921 |