Well, my initial reaction was "No way!", because this means that
you affect somebody else (the file owner) when you do something
(hard link their file with a name in your space), but in fact all
you can do is help them (by lowering their quota) so - maybe!
But this is still unsatisfactory aesthetically. From the point of view
of beauty and simplicity it seems to me that the owner of the original
is the one and only with it on his quota. To continue ...
Personally I would like to see the FS in general react by removing ALL
links to a file when the _owner_ removes the file. OK - we get the same
effect by letting the owner truncate the file before removing his link.
The trouble is that it can't be the default for rm because that breaks all
scripts that rely in the ln+rm trick to safely copy over files. Therefore
it should be an option instead. Everybody immediately alias rm --for-real
foo to "if #foo.links >1 then cp /dev/null foo fi; /bin/rm foo"
The above stops other people file-stealing by waiting on your original
to be erased.
> cost per user = total file size * (1 / # of users hard linking the file)
Personally, I am waiting on a file system that charges other people real
money for reading my files and using my programs ...
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Peter T. Breuer Phd. Ing.,
Area de Ingenieria Telematica E-mail: ptb@it.uc3m.es
Dpto. Ingenieria Tel: +34 1 624 99 47
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Fax: +34 1 624 94 30/65
Butarque 15, E-28911 Leganes URL: http://www.it.uc3m.es/~ptb
Spain