I would like to make a correction to a wrong fact I said in class.

Suppose we have a file P, which is a soft link to another file Q. During the lecture, I incorrectly said that the address inside i-node of P contains the i-node number of Q. This is WRONG. The i-node of P contains address of the data block of P on disk instead (just like normal file). To implement the link, in the data blocks on disk, we store a string that contains the path to Q.

Here is a video that re-explains this: http://goo.gl/3pbt3

What are the pros and cons of these two different approaches?

If we store the path to Q, then we need to take extra steps navigating through the file hierarchy to find the i-node of Q. Whereas if we store the i-node number of Q, we can access Q directly. On the other hand, if we store the path to Q, Q can be a file residing in a different partition.

But here is a deal breaker: what happen after Q is deleted? In both approaches, when we access P, we will encounter an error. But, if we store the i-node number of Q, this i-node number can be reused by another file!! So P can unintentionally linked to another file at a later time. This is not good.

Sorry for the confusion caused by this error.