Unix has the idea of incorporating symbolic link which was similar to Windows shortcut concept.

If you didn’t know, a shortcut is an icon that looks like a file but actually it was just a pointer.

Symbolic links are things that look like files but in actual it was a pointer to files.

You can create symbolic links using the ln -s command in Unix as below: -

$ ln -s <name of actual file> <name of symbolic link>

The symbolic link was useful when sometimes the name of actual file was too long for anyone to remember, then you can simply create a symbolic link with shorter name point to the file.