That's called a link (a hard link). It's just another reference to the inode on disk, indistinguishable from the original. All regular files are hard links, mos

That's called a link (a hard link). It's just another reference to the inode on disk, indistinguishable from the original. All regular files are hard links, most just have a link count of 1. Symlinks are symbolic links (soft links), potentially-relative references to fungible user-facing filesystem paths, that work across filesystems and respect the permissions of the original. They're a special kind of file. It would work with hard links, but you'd have to make and maintain a whole separate real directory structure with an individual link to every file. People used to do this to efficiently maintain branches of the Linux kernel in the days before bitkeeper, depending on their editor to replace files by rename+copy instead of rewriting in-place. Hard links to directories were removed in an early unix for being hostile to reality and fsck, but were added again in Mac OS 10.5's HFS+ implementation to implement Time Machine's storage.