Symbolic link

In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is the nickname for any file that contains a reference to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative path and that affects pathname resolution.

Symbolic links were already present by 1978 in minicomputer operating systems from DEC and Data General's RDOS. Today they are supported by the POSIX operating system standard, most Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X and Windows operating systems such as Windows 95, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and to some degree in Windows 2000 and Windows XP in the form of Shortcut files.