Symbolic links are handy for some special situations. They can be nice since the person browsing your site will not know that where they think a file is, and where it actually is, are two different places. A symbolic link should not be confused with an HTML link, they are completely different. You could think of them more as a pointer or a Shortcut (Windows) or an Alias (Macintosh).
If you want to see a symbolic link in action, follow this link and then try to notice a difference other than the URL. There is no difference because the symbolic_link.html is actually a symbolic link that points to this file symbolic.html. To do this, I had to follow these steps.
The UNIX command is ln which means link. The -s tells the link command that link to be made is symbolic. You will notice in the example above that the file to be "linked" to is listed first, then the name of the "link" is listed.
Rev: ajm 11.04