A Symbolic Link Example

• For example, look at the following output, which is a detective-work of finding the real program that is the mail server on my system (note: long lines were broken down, so they can fit the screen):

  [choo@simey ~]$ ls -l /usr/sbin/sendmail
  lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           21 Aug 15  2002
                           /usr/sbin/sendmail -> /etc/alternatives/mta
  [choo@simey ~]$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/mta
  lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           27 Aug 15  2002
                           /etc/alternatives/mta -> /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail
  [choo@simey ~]$ ls -l /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail
  -r-sr-xr-x    1 root     root       451280 Apr  8  2002
                           /usr/sbin/sendmail.sendmail
       

• The symbolic link has an 'l' as the file type (first character in the output of "ls -l").
• The symbolic link usually has permissions of 'rwxrwxrwx' - but this is not necessary.

Originally written by guy keren