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-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html