What Are Symbolic Links?

Symbolic links are basically advanced shortcuts. Create a symbolic link to an individual file or folder, and that link will appear to be the same as the file or folder to Windows—even though it’s just a link pointing at the file or folder.

There are two type of symbolic links:

Hard and soft. Soft symbolic links work similarly to a standard shortcut. When you open a soft link to a folder, you will be redirected to the folder where the files are stored. However, a hard link makes it appear as though the file or folder actually exists at the location of the symbolic link, and your applications won’t know any better. That makes hard symbolic links more useful in most situations.

How to create symbolic links in windows:

First Run CMD As Administrator.
The below command creates a symbolic, or “soft”, link at Link pointing to the file Target :

mklink Link Target

Use /D when you want to create a soft link pointing to a directory. like so:

mklink /D Link Target

Use /H when you want to create a hard link pointing to a file:

mklink /H Link Target
Use /J to create a hard link pointing to a directory, also known as a directory junction:

mklink /J Link Target

How to create symbolic links in linux:

ln -s <path to the file/folder to be linked> <the path of the link to be created>

Note that ln by default make hard symbolinks

use command below to remove symbolic links in linux
ls -l <path-to-assumed-symlink>