On 11/09/2015 11:10 AM, Frank Cox wrote:>> >And if you aren't familiar with hard links, which rsync happily creates, >> >they were certainly hard enough to wrap my head around, until I got it... > More than one filename for a particular file. What's difficult about that?I think the difficult part is that so many people don't understand that EVERY regular file is a hard link. It doesn't mean "more than one" at all. A hard link is the association between a directory entry (filename) and an inode in the filesystem.
On Mon, 9 Nov 2015 11:36:18 -0800 Gordon Messmer wrote:> I think the difficult part is that so many people don't understand that > EVERY regular file is a hard link. It doesn't mean "more than one" at > all. A hard link is the association between a directory entry > (filename) and an inode in the filesystem.Now that you point that out, I agree. I never thought about it that way before since I've always looked at a hard link as a link that you create after you create the initial file, though they become interchangeable after that. But you're absolutely right and I've learned something today. Thanks! -- MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Real D 3D Digital Cinema ~ www.melvilletheatre.com
On 11/9/2015 12:02 PM, Frank Cox wrote:> Now that you point that out, I agree. I never thought about it that way before since I've always looked at a hard link as a link that you create after you create the initial file, though they become interchangeable after that.on Unix systems, the actual 'file' is known as an inode, and is identified by a inode number. Directories are other files that contain indexed directory entries with filenames pointing to these inodes. the tricky thing with hard links is, you have to walk the whole directory tree of a given file system to find every entry pointing to the same inode if you want to identify these links. -- john r pierce, recycling bits in santa cruz