Re: [Bug-tar] Bug with files which have hardlinks

[Bob Proulx]

Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> Bob Proulx ha escrit:
> > Why did having afile hardlinked to another file change the behavior of
> > tar?  Why did having afile's hardlink count greater than 1 cause tar
> > to think that afile was a hardlink to afile?
> 
> Tar uses a kind of guesswork to decide whether a file is a hard link
> to another already archived file.  It keeps a table of device/inode
> numbers for each archived file.  When a new file is added to the archive
> its device/inode numbers are looked up in this table.  If a matching
> entry is found, the file is deemed to be a hard link to that entry.
> This algorithm is triggered only if the link count of the file
> being added is greater than 1 (well, I'm simplifying a bit, because
> in some cases it is compared with 0, but that doesn't matter here).

Ah!  That makes sense.  That explains the behavior that Thomas Graf
was reporting in the original report.  And normally I would say that
it was good enough but I see that Paul reports that it was improved
just recently so even better.

Thanks,
Bob