It would appear that on May 1, Sean Estabrooks did say: <snip> Pardon my intrusion Sean, But you sound knowledgeable on hard links and I did something silly while trying to get dvd::rip working... I wanted to use a dev reference I could remember better than the way FC1 decided my ide cd-rw is /dev/cdrom1 (a softlink to /dev/scd0) so I wanted to do an # ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/cd-rw But I had two typos, A) left out the -s making a hard link B) fatfingered the cd-rw into cd-0rw # ln /dev/scd0 /dev/cd-0rw But when I went to fix the typo by deleting the link # rm /dev/cd-0rw I get "rm: remove block special file `cd-0rw'?" Now normally I'd be confident that as long as cd-0rw wasn't the *last* hard link... I should be able to safely delete it. But with block special files that I don't know how to recreate properely... Well lets just say I wasn't sure enough... Can you confirm that as long as it's not the *last* hard link then that warning message doesn't matter??? By the way about your answer to the OP... If tar can't tell the difference between two hard links to the same file, and treats both of them as regular files, would that mean that in the case of an actual "tape" archive that included both links, there would two complete copies of the file??? -- | ? ? | | -=- -=- I'm NOT clueless... | <?> <?> But I just don't know. | ^ Joe (theWordy) Philbrook | --- J(tWdy)P | <jtwdyp(a)ttlc.net&gt; | ? ?

On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 03:56, WipeOut wrote: I was surprised by the answers saying tar would "efficiently" handle hard links, so thought I would try it out. It was easy to confirm - I used a copy of the "ls" as the contents of my first tarfile, then the same executable and a hardlink to it in the second tar file. The 2 tarfiles are the same size, and a verbose table of contents on the second tarfile shows tar is aware of the link. Hope this is helpful to those interested. Cheers, Ben [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ cp /bin/ls . [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ ls -l total 80 -rwxr-xr-x 1 ben ben 76188 May 4 23:58 ls [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ tar cf t1.tar ls [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ ls -l total 164 -rwxr-xr-x 1 ben ben 76188 May 4 23:58 ls -rw-rw-r-- 1 ben ben 81920 May 4 23:58 t1.tar [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ ln ls ls2 [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ tar cf t2.tar ls ls2 [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ ls -l total 328 -rwxr-xr-x 2 ben ben 76188 May 4 23:58 ls -rwxr-xr-x 2 ben ben 76188 May 4 23:58 ls2 -rw-rw-r-- 1 ben ben 81920 May 4 23:58 t1.tar -rw-rw-r-- 1 ben ben 81920 May 4 23:58 t2.tar [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ tar tvf t2.tar -rwxr-xr-x ben/ben 76188 2004-05-04 23:58:23 ls -rwxr-xr-x ben/ben 0 2004-05-04 23:58:23 ls2 link to ls