When you work with the command line, you’ll notice that you cannot navigate “into” aliases created with the Finder when in Terminal. For example, you cannot issue a cd command into an alias, because ...

Symbolic links are similar to aliases, in the sense that they are shortcuts that link to a specific file or folder. But symbolic links are often more useful than aliases: For example, if you put an ...

Symbolic links (also called a soft link) are a very important tool to understand in Linux. These are special files that point to other files, similar to shortcuts in Windows or aliases in macOS.

A symlink or "symbolic link" is a Linux file that simply points at another file. If the referenced file is removed, the symlink will remain but not indicate there's a problem until you try to use it.