symlinks are a bit complicated, there is hard and soft ones. they basically work like directories that point to a file. the "hard" part is really a logical hard in the sense that if you copy a hard link you don't copy it, just make a new pointer to it, and if you copy a soft link, you only copy the pointer... the main difference between them has to do with cd/pwd stuff. to be honest i don't even remember exactly, except that links to directories are always soft, and files can be soft or hard. maybe you can remind me the exact distinction.