Google Site Reliability Engineer Mock Interview
Master 30 Google SRE interview questions covering system design, incident response, and distributed systems.
Question 18 of 30
Please discuss hard links and soft links and provide an example of each command.
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William Swansen has worked in the employment assistance realm since 2007. He is an author, job search strategist, and career advisor who helps individuals worldwide and in various professions to find their ideal careers.
As the interview progresses, the interviewer at Google will continue to ask you technical questions. The difficulty of these will vary depending on where you are in the interview, your responses to previous questions, and the nature of the interviewer. You're more likely to be asked a more challenging question towards the end of the interview as the interviewer gains confidence in your capabilities. Continue to respond to these questions directly and succinctly, and anticipate follow-up questions.
William Swansen has worked in the employment assistance realm since 2007. He is an author, job search strategist, and career advisor who helps individuals worldwide and in various professions to find their ideal careers.
"A computer's software uses both hard links and soft links to help you locate files across Google's IT infrastructure. They create connections between file systems and allow you to cross the systems locate files that are not part of your storage structure. A hard link is a copy of the original file. It is more structured than a soft link in that once created, the files cannot cross system boundaries, directories can't be linked, and the inode number is the same as the original file. A soft link is a link to the file that allows you to cross-file systems and link directories. The inode for a soft link is different than that for the original file. Commands for both of these are similar: novel hardlink.file and novel softlink.file."
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