You can also easily explore this on your own:
$ touch a
$ ln -s a b
$ ln a c
$ ls -li
total 0
95905 -rw-r--r-- 1 regnarg regnarg 0 Jun 19 19:01 a
96990 lrwxrwxrwx 1 regnarg regnarg 1 Jun 19 19:01 b -> a
95905 -rw-r--r-- 2 regnarg regnarg 0 Jun 19 19:01 c
The -i
option to ls
shows inode numbers in the first column. You can see that the symlink has a different inode number while the hardlink has the same. You can also use the stat(1)
command:
$ stat a
File: 'a'
Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 regular empty file
Device: 28h/40d Inode: 95905 Links: 2
[...]
$ stat b
File: 'b' -> 'a'
Size: 1 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 symbolic link
Device: 28h/40d Inode: 96990 Links: 1
[...]
If you want to do this programmatically, you can use the lstat(2)
system call to find information about the symlink itself (its inode number etc.), while stat(2)
shows information about the target of the symlink, if it exists. Example in Python:
>>> import os
>>> os.stat("b").st_ino
95905
>>> os.lstat("b").st_ino
96990