Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP) Practice Exam 2025 – All-in-One Guide to Master Your Certification!

A hard link in the traditional UNIX file system serves as an additional reference to the same original file. This means that when you create a hard link, you are essentially creating another name for the same inode, which is the underlying data for the file. Because of this, both the hard link and the original file point to the exact same data on disk.

If you make changes to the file through either the original file name or the hard link, those changes reflect in both locations, as they are just different names for the same content. This functionality is particularly useful for maintaining data integrity because deleting one reference doesn’t remove the actual file until all references to the inode are deleted.

In contrast, creating a new file separate from the original does not define the behavior of hard links since they do not create a distinct file but rather another pathway to the same file data. Hard links can be created through the command line in UNIX and not exclusively via a graphical interface like Finder. Additionally, while multiple users can indeed access the same file concurrently, the functionality of hard links does not specifically facilitate simultaneous editing; rather, it manages file references.