(a quick post for the benefit of linux newbies)
yup no problems copying symlinks (aka softlinks or symbolic links), but remember there are two types of symlinks- absolute and relative. Intutively, absolute ones have the full path to the file and begin with '/'. Relative links can be broken when they are copied, so watch out.
heres a bit of code to explain things:
bash-2.05b$ date >date.txt <-- creating a sample text file
bash-2.05b$ ls
date.txt
bash-2.05b$ ln -s date.txt daterel.txt <-- creating symlink
bash-2.05b$ pwd <-- simple command to show the working dir
/home/jubalj/test
bash-2.05b$ ln -s /home/jubalj/test/date.txt dateabs.txt <-- creating the absolute symbolic link
bash-2.05b$ ls -l
total 5
-rw-r--r-- 1 jubalj users 14 Nov 1 19:09 date.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jubalj users 26 Nov 1 19:24 dateabs.txt -> /home/jubalj/test/date.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jubalj users 8 Nov 1 19:22 daterel.txt -> date.txt
basically if you copied dateabs.txt anywhere.. it would still work.. but if you copied daterel.txt it wont! But note that the default behaviour of the 'cp' command is to copy the actualy file not the link (which kinda means stuff still works).. ie:
bash-2.05b$ cp daterel.txt newdate.txt
bash-2.05b$ ls -l
total 9
-rw-r--r-- 1 jubalj users 30 Nov 1 19:24 date.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jubalj users 26 Nov 1 19:24 dateabs.txt -> /home/jubalj/test/date.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jubalj users 8 Nov 1 19:22 daterel.txt -> date.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 jubalj users 30 Nov 1 19:28 newdate.txt
so newdate.txt is a file and not a link.
Jubal
Edit:did it in a hurry earlier so i've annotated it a bit..hope it makes more sense.
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