Symbolic links are basically advanced shortcuts. A symbolic link you create will appear to be the same as the original file or folder it’s pointing at, even though it’s just a link.

For example, let’s say you have a program that needs its files stored at /home/user/.program. But you want to store those files on another partition, which is mounted at /mnt/partition. You can move the .program directory to /mnt/partition/.program, and then create a symbolic link at /home/user/.program pointing to /mnt/partition/.program. The program will try to access its folder at /home/user/.program, and the operating system will redirect it to /mnt/partition/.program.

This is entirely transparent to the operating system and the programs you use. If you browse to the /home/user/.program directory in a file manager, it will appear to contain the files inside /mnt/partition/.program.

In addition to “symbolic links”, also known as “soft links”, you can instead create a “hard link”. A symbolic or soft link points to a path in the file system. For example, let’s say you have a symbolic (or “soft”) link from /home/examplefile pointing to /var/examplefile. If you move the file at /var/examplefile, the link at /home/examplefile will be broken. However, if you create a “hard link”, it will actually point to the underlying inode on the file system. So, if you created a hard link from /home/examplefile pointing to /var/examplefile and later moved /var/examplefile, the link at /home/examplefile would still point to the file, no matter where you moved it to. The hard link works at a lower level.

You should generally use standard symbolic links, also known as “soft links”, if you’re not sure which to use.

To create a symbolic link with the ln command, you’ll first need to open a terminal window. Once you have, run the ln command in the following form:

ln -s /path/to/original /path/to/link

You can specify either a path to a directory or file in the command. It will “just work”, whatever you enter.

So, if you wanted to create a symbolic link of your Downloads folder located on your Desktop, you’d run the following command:

ln -s /home/name/Downloads /home/name/Desktop

The -s in the command creates a symbolic link. If you wanted to create a hard link instead—again, this is something you usually wouldn’t want to do unless you have a specific reason to do so—you’d exclude the -s from the command.

Using our example, if we look inside our Desktop folder, we find a “Downloads” folder that appears to contain all the same files as our main Downloads folder.

To remove symbolic links, you can just delete them normally. For example, you could right-click them and delete them using a graphical file manager, or use the following command, which is used to delete (or “remove”) any type of file:

rm /path/to/link

Many Linux file managers offer the ability to create symbolic links graphically. If yours does, you can generally do this by right-clicking a folder or file and selecting “Copy”, and then right-clicking inside another folder and selecting “Make Link”, “Paste as Link”, or a similarly named option.

The Nautilus (also called Files) file manager included with Ubuntu’s default GNOME desktop doesn’t have this menu option anymore, but it does have a shortcut that’ll do the same thing. First, simply copy the file or folder as you normally would, with either the context menu or by selecting it and hitting Ctrl+C. Then go to the directory where you want the symlink to be and hit Ctrl+M. Nautilus will create a symbolic link to the original file or folder at the location rather than moving or duplicating the original file or folder.