Does creating a symbolic link to another symbolic link have any side-effects?

linux symlink
5gfbtest picture 5gfbtest · Jan 14, 2011 · Viewed 24.3k times · Source

Does creating a symlink to another symlink on a linux box have any side effects (specifically in terms of performance)?

Answer

Daniel Gallagher picture Daniel Gallagher · Jan 14, 2011

In general, no. Technically, there will be a very slight performance hit for the indirection, but it won't be noticeable to your application. As an example, most shared libraries are symlinks to symlinks (e.g. libQtCore.so -> libQtCore.so.4 -> libQtCore.so.4.7 -> libQtCore.so.4.7.1).

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