If I'm interpreting your question correctly, the short answer is "no", but with a large caveat. You can create hard links, which will give you the same effect as symlinks with an important difference. If you start with file A in location 1, then you link file B in location 2 to file A, they appear identical. With a symlink, if you then delete file A, file B is worthless and is a dangling pointer. With a hard link, file B is intact and contains the expected contents. It's important to note that while symlinks can cross filesystem boundaries, hard links cannot. You use the ln
command to create hard links similar to the way you use it to create symlinks.
While hard links make it appear that the file actually exists in two locations simultaneously, it actually exists only in one place on-disk and simply has filesystem inodes in multiple locations pointing to that same location. It's very much a splitting of technical hairs as to why the short answer is "no" and yet the "workaround" gives you pretty much exactly what I believe you're asking for.
find /mount/point ...
and wait a couple minutes for the command to complete, I think this is (perhaps among others) reason for John to say "no". – alec Nov 22 '21 at 17:12