Limitations of Hard Links
To prevent endless recursion, most modern operating systems don't allow hard links on directories. In addition, hard links on directories would lead to inconsistency on parent directory entries. A notable exception to this is Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard) and newer, which use hard links on directories for the Time Machine backup mechanism only. Symbolic links and NTFS junction points are generally used instead for this purpose.
Hard links can only be created to files on the same volume. If a link to a file on a different volume is needed, it may be created with a symbolic link.
The maximum number of hard links to a single file is limited by the size of the reference counter: with NTFS this is limited to 1023 because a 10 bit field is used for this purpose. On Unix-like systems the counter is usually machine-word-sized (32 or 64-bit: 4,294,967,295 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 links, respectively), though in some filesystems such as btrfs the number of hard links is limited more strictly by their on-disk format.
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