What is the difference between the link and ln commands?

Question

From the man pages:

ln - make links between files

and

link - call the link function to create a link to a file

These seem to do the same thing however ln takes a lot of options as well.

Is link just a very basic ln? Is there any reason to use link over ln?

Solution 1

link used solely for hard links, calls the link() system function and doesn't perform error checking when attempting to create the link

ln has error checking and can create hard and soft links

Solution 2

The link command creates a hard link to a file.

According to the manual page, it is the same as:

$ ln --directory --no-target-directory FILENAME LINKNAME

See man link or info coreutils 'link invocation' for more details.