What's a symbolic link?
lrwxrwxrwx 1 mjd mjd 42 2007年12月05日 18:50 sigils.html -> /home/mjd/public_html/perl/yak/sigils.html
There's an inode like usual
A special bit is set in the mode
Suppose the kernel is resolving a filename
Suppose it resolves to this inode
The kernel sees the symlink bit set
It reads the file
In this case the file contents are /home/mjd/public_html/perl/yak/sigils.html
It starts the lookup process all over again with that filename instead