There's a lot wrong or at least weirdly described in the symlink entry.
> symlink(oldpath, newpath) operates very much like link(2) but creates a symbolic link at a new inode rather than a hard link to the same inode.
This is a really rough description. What really happens with a hardlink is a new directory entry is created that points to the same inode; with a symlink a new inode is created of type symlink that points to a directory entry by path/name.
> Symbolic links can point to directories, which hard links cannot, making them a perfect analogy to link(2) when locking entire directories. This will fail with the error code EEXIST if newpath already exists, making this a perfect analogy to link(2) that works for directories, too.
Except there's no way to count the number of symlinks that point to a given path like there is with the link count of the inode with multiple hardlinks.
> Be careful of symbolic links whose target inode has been removed ("dangling" symbolic links) — open(2) will fail with the error code ENOENT.
As symlinks point to a path, a dandling symlink is the result of the target path being removed (or not existing), not removal of an inode. You can put something else at that path, and the symlink will take you there instead. ENOENT is returned because the symlink doesn't point to anything.
The lstat(2) call can be used to examine symlinks directly, normally file operations access the file through the symlink making it mildly challenging to distinguish between a regular file and symlink.
> It should be mentioned that inodes are a finite resource (this particular machine has 1,245,184 inodes).
This is unrelated information. It is filesystem format dependent.
> symlink(oldpath, newpath) operates very much like link(2) but creates a symbolic link at a new inode rather than a hard link to the same inode.
This is a really rough description. What really happens with a hardlink is a new directory entry is created that points to the same inode; with a symlink a new inode is created of type symlink that points to a directory entry by path/name.
> Symbolic links can point to directories, which hard links cannot, making them a perfect analogy to link(2) when locking entire directories. This will fail with the error code EEXIST if newpath already exists, making this a perfect analogy to link(2) that works for directories, too.
Except there's no way to count the number of symlinks that point to a given path like there is with the link count of the inode with multiple hardlinks.
> Be careful of symbolic links whose target inode has been removed ("dangling" symbolic links) — open(2) will fail with the error code ENOENT.
As symlinks point to a path, a dandling symlink is the result of the target path being removed (or not existing), not removal of an inode. You can put something else at that path, and the symlink will take you there instead. ENOENT is returned because the symlink doesn't point to anything.
The lstat(2) call can be used to examine symlinks directly, normally file operations access the file through the symlink making it mildly challenging to distinguish between a regular file and symlink.
> It should be mentioned that inodes are a finite resource (this particular machine has 1,245,184 inodes).
This is unrelated information. It is filesystem format dependent.