hiya all, is a symbolic link the same or similar to a shortcut in windows - yes i am thick when it comes to linux lol
Similar, but not quite the same. When you follow a symbolic link in linux, it takes you to its destination like in windows. But it is more flexible than a shortcut. A symlink from /usr/local/example to /home/user would point to the /home/user directory. A program that writes to /usr/local/example directory would actually write to /home/user. In windows, the shortcut does not have that feature. A symlink is "transparent" in that it is not actually a file like .lnk shortcuts in windows, but a pointer instead.
so a symbolic link stores both the source & destinations within it, but does it write the data to both locations of just to /user/local/example or /home/user
In my example, /usr/local/example is the symlink. It doesn't write data itself. If I program tries to write to /usr/local/example, it seems to the program that it is writing to the directory. But in actual fact the data is being "redirected" to /home/user. Another example of use: Writing a file to the directory /usr/local/example/mydocs/ actually writes to /home/user/mydocs. the user/programs can write to directories contained within a symlink to some extent. A symbolic link is just in fact, a link. It doesn't make a copy of the file, but simply "redirects" attempts to read/write to it to the actual destination.
