Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 5 Jan 2004 01:58:28 +0000 | From | viro@parcelfa ... | Subject | Re: udev and devfs - The final word |
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On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 08:43:27PM -0500, Jeremy Maitin-Shepard wrote:
> Unfortunately, programs such as tar depend on inode numbers of distinct > files being distinct even when the file is not open over a period of > several minutes/seconds. This is needed to avoid dumping hard links > more than once. Furthermore, there is no efficient way to write > programs such as tar without depending on this capability. Thus, if > st_ino cannot be used reliably for this purpose, it would be useful for > there to be a system call for retrieving a true > unique-within-the-filesystem identifier for the file.
No such thing. It's not the matter of having a syscall to extract such identifier - it's that on a lot of filesystems (including many common Unix ones) there's nothing that would qualify.
Note that tar et.al. do not behave well if used on actively modified directory tree and ->st_ino reuse is the least of the problems in that area. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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