A magician's secret

We know that there are many groups of people in this world that can and often do annoy us; magicians perhaps being just one of those groups of people. They annoy us because we do not know how they do what they do; quite simply we know that we are being tricked, but we don't quite know how. Well let me be the one to break the honor of the magician's circle and disclose a little trick within CentOS Linux that you can use to trick your colleagues; believe me when I say that this is one trick worth knowing.

Let me show you that if I run the following command on my CentOS 6.5 system, I will be shown a long listing of the specified doc directory:

$ ls -ld /usr/share/doc

The output on my system is as follows:

drwxr-xr-x. 758 root root 36864 May 1 09:09 /usr/share/doc

The first number that is displayed, 758, is the link count. This shows the number of filenames that are hard linked to the file's metadata; in simple terms, this directory has 758 separate names.

Immediately from...