Pointers
 

I'm a newie on Linux. I have a question in regards to pointers.
We are installing openfiler on a linux machine. One of the linux machine has:
openfiler -> /usr/sbin/httpd
The other one doesn't have the pointer "->". What does the symbol "->" means? And how do I make it to work? Any help is appreciated.

I assume that you are seeing this in the output of an 'ls -l' or similar command?

The is symbol denotes that the file to the left of it is a symbolic link to the file on the right of it. It is similar to, but not the same as, a shortcut or '.lnk' file in Windows.

So, on the machine that you see this link on, the file 'openfiler' is a symbolic link to '/usr/sbin/httpd", which is the executable that starts the web server.

In some cases, binaries will check to see how they were invoked and modify their behavior based on this, like bash, the Bourne-Again Shell; it will behave (mostly) like a POSIX Bourne shell if invoked through the symbolic link "/bin/sh".