Re: Finding hardlinks

From: Pavel Machek
Date: Thu Jan 04 2007 - 18:00:25 EST


Hi!

> > > High probability is all you have. Cosmic radiation hitting your
> > > computer will more likly cause problems, than colliding 64bit inode
> > > numbers ;)
> >
> > Some of us have machines designed to cope with cosmic rays, and would be
> > unimpressed with a decrease in reliability.
>
> With the suggested samefile() interface you'd get a failure with just
> about 100% reliability for any application which needs to compare a
> more than a few files. The fact is open files are _very_ expensive,
> no wonder they are limited in various ways.
>
> What should 'tar' do when it runs out of open files, while searching
> for hardlinks? Should it just give up? Then the samefile() interface
> would be _less_ reliable than the st_ino one by a significant margin.

You need at most two simultenaously open files for examining any
number of hardlinks. So yes, you can make it reliable.
Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/