How can you see the actual hard link by ls?

You can find inode number for your file with

ls -i

and

ls -l

shows references count (number of hardlinks to a particular inode)

after you found inode number, you can search for all files with same inode:

find . -inum NUM

will show filenames for inode NUM in current dir (.)

There isn't really a well-defined answer to your question. Unlike symlinks, hardlinks are indistinguishable from the "original file".

Directory entries consist of a filename and a pointer to an inode. The inode in turn contains the file metadata and (pointers to) the actual file contents). Creating a hard link creates another filename + reference to the same inode. These references are unidirectional (in typical filesystems, at least) -- the inode only keeps a reference count. There is no intrinsic way to find out which is the "original" filename.

By the way, this is why the system call to "delete" a file is called unlink. It just removes a hardlink. The inode an attached data are deleted only if the inode's reference count drops to 0.

The only way to find the other references to a given inode is to exhaustively search over the file system checking which files refer to the inode in question. You can use 'test A -ef B' from the shell to perform this check.

UNIX has hard links and symbolic links (made with "ln" and "ln -s" respectively). Symbolic links are simply a file that contains the real path to another file and can cross filesystems.

Hard links have been around since the earliest days of UNIX (that I can remember anyway, and that's going back quite a while). They are two directory entries that reference the exact same underlying data. The data in a file is specified by its inode. Each file on a file system points to an inode but there's no requirement that each file point to a unique inode - that's where hard links come from.

Since inodes are unique only for a given filesystem, there's a limitation that hard links must be on the same filesystem (unlike symbolic links). Note that, unlike symbolic links, there is no privileged file - they are all equal. The data area will only be released when all the files using that inode are deleted (and all processes close it as well, but that's a different issue).

You can use the "ls -i" command to get the inode of a particular file. You can then use the "find <filesystemroot> -inum <inode>" command to find all files on the filesystem with that given inode.

Here's a script which does exactly that. You invoke it with:

findhardlinks ~/jquery.js

and it will find all files on that filesystem which are hard links for that file:

pax@daemonspawn:~# ./findhardlinks /home/pax/jquery.js
Processing '/home/pax/jquery.js'
   '/home/pax/jquery.js' has inode 5211995 on mount point '/'
       /home/common/jquery-1.2.6.min.js
       /home/pax/jquery.js

Here's the script.

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $# -lt 1 ]] ; then
    echo "Usage: findhardlinks <fileOrDirToFindFor> ..."
    exit 1
fi

while [[ $# -ge 1 ]] ; do
    echo "Processing '$1'"
    if [[ ! -r "$1" ]] ; then
        echo "   '$1' is not accessible"
    else
        numlinks=$(ls -ld "$1" | awk '{print $2}')
        inode=$(ls -id "$1" | awk '{print $1}' | head -1l)
        device=$(df "$1" | tail -1l | awk '{print $6}')
        echo "   '$1' has inode ${inode} on mount point '${device}'"
        find ${device} -inum ${inode} 2>/dev/null | sed 's/^/        /'
    fi
    shift
done