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We give a classification of Legendrian torus links. Along the way, we give the first classification of infinite families of Legendrian links where some smooth symmetries of the link cannot be realized by Legendrian isotopies. We also give the first family of links that are non-destabilizable but do not have maximal \tb invariant and observe a curious distribution of Legendrian torus knots that can be realized as the components of a Legendrian torus link. This classification of Legendrian torus links leads to a classification of transversal torus links. We also give a classification of Legendrian and transversal cable links of knot types that are uniformly thick and Legendrian simple. Here we see some similarities with the classification of Legendrian torus links, but also some differences. In particular, we show that there are Legendrian representatives of cable links of any uniformly thick knot type for which no symmetries of the components can be realized by a Legendrian isotopy, others where only cyclic permutations of the components can be realized, and yet others where all smooth symmetries are realizable. 

It is known that any contact $$3$$-manifold can be obtained by rationally contact Dehn surgery along a Legendrian link $$L$$ in the standard tight contact $$3$$-sphere. We define and study various versions of contact surgery numbers, the minimal number of components of a surgery link $$L$$ describing a given contact $$3$$-manifold under consideration. In the first part of the paper, we relate contact surgery numbers to other invariants in terms of various inequalities. In particular, we show that the contact surgery number of a contact manifold is bounded from above by the topological surgery number of the underlying topological manifold plus three. In the second part, we compute contact surgery numbers of all contact structures on the $$3$$-sphere. Moreover, we completely classify the contact structures with contact surgery number one on $$S^1\times S^2$$, the Poincar\'e homology sphere and the Brieskorn sphere $$\Sigma(2,3,7)$$. We conclude that there exist infinitely many non-isotopic contact structures on each of the above manifolds which cannot be obtained by a single rational contact surgery from the standard tight contact $$3$$-sphere. We further obtain results for the $$3$$-torus and lens spaces. As one ingredient of the proofs of the above results we generalize computations of the homotopical invariants of contact structures to contact surgeries with more general surgery coefficients which might be of independent interest.