Re: Finding hardlinks

[Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 03:43:14PM -0800, Bryan Henderson wrote:
> >but you can get a large number of >1 linked
> >files, when you copy full directories with "cp -rl".  Which I do a lot
> >when developing. I've done that a few times with the Linux tree.
> 
> Can you shed some light on how you use this technique?  (I.e. what does it 
> do for you?)

A couple of weeks ago, a colleague asked me to generate a patch against
his tree in a hurry.  I did cp -rl his-tree my-tree (which completed
quickly), edited the two files that needed to be patched, then did
diff -urp his-tree my-tree, which also completed quickly, as diff knows
that if two files have the same inode, they don't need to be opened.

> Many people are of the opinion that since the invention of symbolic links, 
> multiple hard links to files have been more trouble than they're worth.  I 

Other people are of the opinion that the invention of the symbolic link
was a huge mistake.  Po-tato, pot-ato ...