Re: Finding hardlinks

[Frank van Maarseveen]

On Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 08:17:34PM +0100, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 3 Jan 2007, Frank van Maarseveen wrote:
> 
> >On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 01:04:06AM +0100, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> >>
> >>I didn't hardlink directories, I just patched stat, lstat and fstat to
> >>always return st_ino == 0 --- and I've seen those failures. These failures
> >>are going to happen on non-POSIX filesystems in real world too, very
> >>rarely.
> >
> >I don't want to spoil your day but testing with st_ino==0 is a bad choice
> >because it is a special number. Anyway, one can only find breakage,
> >not prove that all the other programs handle this correctly so this is
> >kind of pointless.
> >
> >On any decent filesystem st_ino should uniquely identify an object and
> >reliably provide hardlink information. The UNIX world has relied upon this
> >for decades. A filesystem with st_ino collisions without being hardlinked
> >(or the other way around) needs a fix.
> 
> ... and that's the problem --- the UNIX world specified something that 
> isn't implementable in real world.

Sure it is. Numerous popular POSIX filesystems do that. There is a lot of
inode number space in 64 bit (of course it is a matter of time for it to
jump to 128 bit and more)

-- 
Frank
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