We've mentioned the term link when referring to the relationship between directory entries and inodes. There are actually two kinds of links available on Linux. The kind we've discussed so far are called hard links. A given inode can have any number of hard links, and the inode will persist on the filesystem until all the hard links disappear. New hard links can be created using the ln command:

$ cd /tmp
$ touch firstlink
$ ln firstlink secondlink
$ ls -i firstlink secondlink
  15782 firstlink    15782 secondlink