Many thanks to all those that responded! It's gratifying to know there's still
more I can learn.
There were two threads of thought for the 'ln' command:
1 - Using symbolic links (ln -s) allowed for the capability to determine the
original file that was linked to.
2 - Using hard links reduces the I/O overhead when accessing the file. Of the
responsed I received in this thread, the following from John Wright summarizes:
<snip>
A soft link is slower....
A hard link is simply another directory entry for the same inode.
In other words a simple 'open' on the hard link is a one step process.
An 'open' on a symlink is actually:
* open symlink
* read file to get real name
* close symlink
* open real file
In itself this is not a big overhead but when you open/close the file
thousands of times (e.g. via Oracle) the impact is significant.
<snip>
Due to the number of files/links involved, the reduced I/O overhead with hard
links is the clear winner.
Once again, thanks to all!
Regards,
Wil
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