Re: Finding hardlinks

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Mon Jan 08 2007 - 06:27:48 EST


On Fri 2007-01-05 16:15:41, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > > And does it matter? If you rename a file, tar might skip it no matter of
> > > hardlink detection (if readdir races with rename, you can read none of the
> > > names of file, one or both --- all these are possible).
> > >
> > > If you have "dir1/a" hardlinked to "dir1/b" and while tar runs you delete
> > > both "a" and "b" and create totally new files "dir2/c" linked to "dir2/d",
> > > tar might hardlink both "c" and "d" to "a" and "b".
> > >
> > > No one guarantees you sane result of tar or cp -a while changing the tree.
> > > I don't see how is_samefile() could make it worse.
> >
> > There are several cases where changing the tree doesn't affect the
> > correctness of the tar or cp -a result. In some of these cases using
> > samefile() instead of st_ino _will_ result in a corrupted result.
>
> Also note, that using st_ino in combination with samefile() doesn't
> make the result much better, it eliminates false positives, but cannot
> fix false negatives.

I'd argue false negatives are not as severe.
Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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