What are hard and symbolic links?? and why do we need to use RAW devices..? what is it??

Hello, Iīm suposing that you know what a link is, and what you want to know is the difference between hard and symbolic. Do you? A hard link is a link made at inode level, that is at a filesystem level. You can only hard link files of the same filesystem. A symbolic link is just another file which content is just the path to the "original" file. It can be on another filesystem (and on another computer if it is imported via nfs....) If the source file is removed, the link is broken.... Bye, jmiturbe

Hello again, I donīt know too much about the other question, but seeing that nobody replies, here is my explanation about raw devices. You can access a device (for example a disk drive) in two modes: normal mode (donīt know how to call this mode) and raw mode. If you access normal mode (for example /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0) you use the filesystem logic, that is, itīs Solarisīfile system mechanism who manages disks writes/reads. Sometimes itīs necesary to access the drive in a more raw mode (to repair the filesystem with fsck because itīs not OK, because you are using a software that does not use Solaris filesystem logic and uses itīs own logic to write onto disks like some installations of Oracle, etc...). In these cases you use /dev/rdsk/cXtXdXsX instead of /dev/dsk/cXtXdXsX. The way to access the drive depends on the aplication that is going to perform the access. Bye, jmiturbe

Thank you so much for your help!!