[Ardour-Dev] Trouble with imported files

[Jörn Nettingsmeier]

Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 08, 2009 at 09:17:42PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
> 
>> sounds like your using the wrong tool to make the copy. what are you using?
>> i am fairly sure that tar(1) will preserve the links *as links*, and not
>> pretend that there are actually two copies.
> 
> There is no difference between two hard links. 
> Tar can ignore soft links, as can cp and rsync,
> but a hard link is the same thing as the original.
> None of them, afaik, keeps a list of files already
> copied to detect duplicates. It would fail anyway
> if the copies are not made using a single command.

iirc tar is keeping keep track of inode numbers to deal with hard links,
and will recreate them. this page
http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/tar/hard-links.html
seems to confirm that.

many tools are actually quite smart in dealing with hard links. for
instance, i usually do incremental backups with rsync and tell it to
hardlink files that already exist and are unchanged, to save diskspace.
when i run du -sch over each one of two identical backups, i get N bytes
of disk usage. when i run it over both, i get roughly N bytes as well,
so it is obviously keeping track of inodes.

best,

jörn


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