Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:36:57 +0100 (CET) | From | Mikulas Patocka <> | Subject | Re: Finding hardlinks |
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>> I've came across this problem: how can a userspace program (such as for >> example "cp -a") tell that two files form a hardlink? Comparing inode >> number will break on filesystems that can have more than 2^32 files (NFS3, >> OCFS, SpadFS; kernel developers already implemented iget5_locked for the >> case of colliding inode numbers). Other possibilities: >> >> --- compare not only ino, but all stat entries and make sure that >> i_nlink > 1? >> --- is not 100% reliable either, only lowers failure probability >> --- create a hardlink and watch if i_nlink is increased on both files? >> --- doesn't work on read-only filesystems >> --- compare file content? >> --- "cp -a" won't then corrupt data at least, but will create >> hardlinks where they shouldn't be. >> >> Is there some reliable way how should "cp -a" command determine that? >> Finding in kernel whether two dentries point to the same inode is trivial >> but I am not sure how to let userspace know ... am I missing something? > > The stat64.st_ino field is 64bit, so AFAICS you'd only need to extend > the kstat.ino field to 64bit and fix those filesystems to fill in > kstat correctly.
There is 32-bit __st_ino and 64-bit st_ino --- what is their purpose? Some old compatibility code?
> SUSv3 requires st_ino/st_dev to be unique within a system so the > application shouldn't need to bend over backwards.
I see but kernel needs to be fixed for that. Would patches for changing kstat be accepted?
Mikulas
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