While HDF5 offers support for symbolic links (hard, soft and external), NetCDF4 does NOT support symbolic links.

The Fortran and C HDF5 API uses H5Lcreate_soft to create soft links. In h5fortran, soft links are created by:

call h%softlink(target, link)

The Python h5py interface is a popular and robust means to access HDF5 files from Python. h5py.SoftLink allows creating soft links.