It was pointed out to me that inode numbers on Linux are no longer expected to be unique per file system, even for local file systems. Applications sometimes need to check if two (open) files are the same. For example, a program may want to use a temporary file if is invoked with input and output files referring to the same file. How can we check for this? The POSIX way is to compare st_ino and st_dev in stat output, but if inode numbers are not unique, that will result in files falsely being reported as identical. It's harmless in the temporary file case, but it in other scenarios, it may result in data loss. Thanks, Florian
