Are they similar to shortcut in windows ?
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Yes, very similar. They have much nicer behaviour than Windows shortcuts though. You can treat them as if they are the file they are pointing to in almost all cases, while windows will mostly only follow shortcuts when the user double clicks on them.
If you delete the file the symbolic link points to, the symlink becomes broken.
Symbolic links are sometimes called “soft links” as well.
You can also create “hard links” which more or less makes a file exist in two directories at the same time.
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