OT: Hard links (Was re: Entry (main) method inside a class?)

[Joel C. Salomon]

Stewart Gordon wrote:
> Strange.  I wonder just how these hard links work.  Does deleting one of them delete the whole lot in one fell swoop, or produce loads of dead links?  Or do they disappear as and when you try to determine their existence?

On UNIX and Windows (NTFS), hard links are reference-counted; the 
directory entry (the datum that has the file’s name and position in the 
directory tree) has a “link” to the actual file data.  The “delete” 
operation is called “unlink” under UNIX because it unlinks a directory 
entry from a file — and, if there are no other links to the file, 
deletes the file.

--Joel