Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 4th Nov 2010 22:40 UTC, submitted by rhyder
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RE[2]: Already possible with ln
by cristoper on Sat 6th Nov 2010 15:15
in reply to "RE: Already possible with ln"
Yes. A naive solution is not difficult. You just need wrappers around ln and rm that update an index whenever a link is created or removed. And then a tool to search the index and list all of the names of a given file (like 'update' but just for hard links).
Of course ln and rm are not the only tools that can create and remove links, so a better solution would be to handle it at the system call level... or at the filesystem level, which I guess is sort of what this article is suggesting.




Member since:
2005-07-11
Yes. What is lacking with hard links is the ability to find other names for the same file, without traversing the file system tree. So there is no easy way to delete something (it happens when you remove the last link to the inode), and you can't list which tags/directories a file is currently associated with.
Well, you can do it with `find`, but it is too slow to be practical. I'd say fix this problem rather than establish a new way to tag files.