soft link and mounting with bind option

[sram]

What is the difference between these two. mainly from their usage point of view and if you could, implementation also.

thanx in advance

[platojones]

With a bind mount, a filesystem (or part of a file system) can be mounted in multiple places. A soft (or symbolic) link simply creates a reference to another file or directory. I don't really know what you have in mind, but the main difference would be how they are managed: with ln or with mount. In practice, they seem to accomplish much the same thing. I don't think a bind mount can mount a standard file, for instance, but you can create a soft link to one. From a management standpoint, mounts are globally visible and can be managed through fstab, where links are local to their locations. Another consideration would be if you wanted to detect a soft link. Many standard utilities take soft links into account (such as cp and tar, which can discriminate between a soft link and a real directory and act according to the flags you've set). Here's a good article on bind mounts, btw:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-fs3.html#g01

[nephros]