Bryan Henderson wrote: > >>Adding a vfs call to check for file equivalence seems like a good idea to me. > >That would be only barely useful. It would let 'diff' say, "those are >both the same file," but wouldn't be useful for something trying to >duplicate a filesystem (e.g. a backup program). Such a program can't do >the comparison between every possible pairing of file names. Gnu tar, for example, remembers and matches <st_dev, st_ino> only for potential hard links (st_nlink > 1). My thinking was that the application will call the equivalence syscall to verify a match on the inode number (and when nlink > 1), not for every pair of files in the filesystem. > >I'd rather just see a unique file identifier that's as big as it needs to >be. And the more unique the better. (There are lots of degrees of >uniqueness; unique as long as the files exist; as long as the filesystems >are mounted, etc.). > >-- >Bryan Henderson IBM Almaden Research Center >San Jose CA Filesystems > - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
