Yep: https://www.portablefreeware.com/forums/ is a great site/forum to look through for what's out there for portable software.
The list here gives a good overview of the advantages and disadvantages of hard and soft links:
The list here gives a good overview of the advantages and disadvantages of hard and soft links:
The bottom line is that in many use cases either link type works equally well, but in some one or the other type is advantageous. The efficiency, mentioned in many answers here, is probably of a very little concern with modern machines and filesystems, unless you are scavenging a filesystem on a FLASH chip of a puny embedded controller. The functional differences are more important, and usually dictate the engineering constraints and the ultimate choice:
- The hard link "source" can be moved safely, while the soft link will break.
- The hard link is indistinguishable from the file it was linked from, and the file is alive as long as any of the hard links is alive; the soft link is asymmetrical.
- The hard-linked peer breaks out of the linked group if deleted and re-created, but the soft link does not lose its target.
- The soft link may cross filesystems, the hard link cannot.
- The soft link may point to a directory, the hard link usually cannot (and practically always should not).
Statistics: Posted by Alex88 — Yesterday, 7:28 pm