LFCS: Linux Foundation Certified System AdministratorDemo

A hard link is simply an additional directory entry that references the same underlying inode as the original file. Because the inode itself (which stores size, permissions, and the inode number) is shared and unchanged, those attributes remain identical for every hard-linked name. What does change is the inode's link count (the st_nlink value), which is incremented by one for every additional hard link created and decremented when a link is removed; the file is only truly deleted from disk once this count reaches zero. This behavior is documented in standard Linux filesystem and ln command references.