I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I like when the files I’m working with are in the working directory (so instead of using pathnames to my files I can just type filename or ./filename). But to avoid copying data and wasting space, symbolic links are the way to go. The command for that is:

ln -s target_file sym_link,

where -s stands for “symbolic” (just ln would create a hard link)

However, if you are not a complete UNIX guru, then trying to access your linked files is likely to produce one of these errors:

No such file or directory OR Too many levels of symbolic links

The solution to both of these is to always use full paths to the files and their symbolic links (ln -s /home/folder/file.txt /home/folder2/file.txt). For further information, see this and this. Apparently you can have 32 levels of symbolic links, so getting a “Too many levels of symbolic links” after just creating one, means that there is some serious recursion going on.

Remove symbolic links just as you remove files:

rm sym_link