re-linking hard links

[Daniel Davidson]

Nope, I am only using one drive (with a single ext3 filesystem on it).
I know I can do a find -inum, but I was wondering if there was something
more efficient.

I am actually using an md5 checksum to find duplicate files, but then I
need to hunt down all their hard links.

Dan


On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 01:46 +0200, Herta Van den Eynde wrote:
> Daniel Davidson wrote:
> > Hello, 
> > 
> > I have a situation where I have numerous files with numerous hard links 
> > to each of them on an ext3 RHEL4.2 system.  Some of these files are 
> > duplicates of the others.  I would like to re-link all of the 
> > duplicates to point to a single inode.  
> > For instance if file1 has 
> > hardlinks link1 and link2, and file2 has hardlinks link3 and link4, I 
> > need to change it so that link1, link2 (these two are already correct), 
> > file2, link3, and link4 are all hardinks to file1.  The only 
> > information I have to start with are the inode numbers of file1 and 
> > file2 and the pathnames of file1 and file2. 
> 
> Not sure I understand properly.  It looks as though you want to compare 
> every file on a given filesystem with every other file on that 
> filesystem, and if they are duplicates, replace one of the actual files 
> with a hard link to the other file.
> 
> > Any ideas beyond searching all of the filenames on the system and 
> > replacing them with the proper link?  
> 
> Remember that hardlinks cannot cross filesystem borders.
> 
> > That takes a long time. 
> 
> I suppose you could write a script that cksums all files on the 
> filesystem, sorts the output, and verifies that two files with the same 
> cksum are actually the same.  If they are, it could ask whether it's OK 
> to overwrite one of the files with a hardlink to the other.  And yes, 
> depending on the size of your filesystem, that would take time.
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Herta
> 
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