Comments on: Why isn’t it possible to create hard links across file system boundaries?

By: eric peyser

eric peyser — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:55:11 +0000

I may date myself here —-but –Unix beyond the magic garden– was a great book. It had alot of internals. from FS and the internals to IPC and named/unnamed pipe info. It helped me to understand what was behind the screen. BTW article was great !!!!

By: eric peyser

eric peyser — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:51:18 +0000

with what Franklin put forth, go over the example again. When spanning multiple FS you may encounter duplicate inodes. On a single physical HD with multiple mount points most FS (that i know of) keep track of the data by drive. the inodes are created in a incremental fashion.

-Eric Peyser

By: sumant

sumant — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:34:09 +0000

I want know about u have create a hardlink that time delete man hardlink file. then u have access that file or not tell me please

By: Mehdi (ATI/AMD Drivers)

Mehdi (ATI/AMD Drivers) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:25:48 +0000

Thanks Babu,
I used different name and it worked.
I was testing to see why this 60 Gig hard drive does not mount on ts own while th cdrom0 and floppy0 loaded no problem!?
Thanks!

By: Babu Satasiya

Babu Satasiya — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:13:18 +0000

In general we create softlink for sortcut, If you already have file or folder name on current directory, why do you want same name softlink, it does not make sense to have duplicate softlink or even hardlink on same folder or in otherwords, directory maintains filenames and it requires uniq names you can not have duplicate names for given file in same folder.

if you are planing to create softlink from different partition or folder, it should not cause any problem.

Look at following example, I am creating data.txt to data.txt it gives error but when I tried data.txt to data1.txt, it works fine.
ln -s data.txt data.txt
ln: creating symbolic link `data.txt’: File exists
ln -s data.txt data1.txt
ls -la data*.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2009-08-13 00:02 data1.txt -> data.txt
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 15 2009-08-12 23:53 data.txt

Hope this helps,
Babu Satasiya

By: Mehdi (ATI/AMD Drivers)

Mehdi (ATI/AMD Drivers) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:47:30 +0000

I was just wondering how I could make a link to a drive?
When I do
root@Ubuntu9:media > ln -s disk disk
it returns an error saying /media/disk already exists!

I know it exists I just want to make a link to it (shortcut),
I know it seems dumb/redundant to make a same name link in the same folder but I was trying to figure out why this disk does not mount?and thought it may help because the cdrom and other disks mount OK and they all have links in the /media!
when I do mount disk it returns the usual fstab nonsense. It (disk) ONLY come up when I use the GUI and go in My Computer, then it appears in the /media directory?
So I thought it has something to do with making a link?
thanks@!

By: Nanda

Nanda — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:28:18 +0000

Otherwise to say, the inode number will not and can not be unique across filesystems / servers / partitions.

Hope this helps.
Nanda

By: ruggo

ruggo — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 23:28:11 +0000

Karan,

If the /tmp directory is on the same partition as where ‘sfile’ is, then you can hard link it. You can’t hard link across different partitions/disks. They’re different file systems, therefore the inodes differ on each partition.

By: karan

karan — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:25:25 +0000

hi,

I need some clarification.

I am very clear that hard links points to same inode number.
==========================================================
Now if you try to create a hard link for /tmp file system it will lead to confusing references for UNIX or Linux file system. Is that a link no. 782263 in the /home or /tmp file system? To avoid this problem UNIX or Linux does not allow creating hard links across file system boundaries
======================================================
If i am trying to create hard link for /tmp file system.
For example:
$ cd /home/karan
$ touch sfile
$ ln sfile hfile
$ ls – ali
4489496 -rw-r–r– 3 karan karan 0 2008-12-19 13:41 hfile
4489496 -rw-r–r– 3 karan karan 0 2008-12-19 13:41 sfile

very clear till this part.

Do you meant to say that we cannot create hard links like the below?

$ ln sfile /tmp/hfile

If i misunderstood,please do clear me.

Thanks

By: rewt

rewt — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:15:06 +0000

Your /tmp example above assumes that a novice-user already knows the difference between ‘filesystems’ . This term is used interchangeably and the meaning depends on the context where[how] it’s used.

/tmp above implies it’s on a different partition (and may be possibly another filesystem(ext2 rather than ext3(/home)).

Subtle meaning
1) A FSH – example all dir’s under ‘/’ on a single partition.
2) Different (logically grouped or part of entire hierarchy)dir’s under same partition ,different partition’s or on different type-of-filesystem(ext2[3],reiser etc).

Anyways, keep up the good work.

By: franklin

franklin — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:34:27 +0000

Answer is good but simply say “Another name to same file”with same inodes.

By: nobody

nobody — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:11:41 +0000

this example was confusing
because you are using
the same name
for the files
and
for the paths

By: Debakanta

Debakanta — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 07:07:48 +0000

Hi,
I wants to know that where are the links store?,is it created automatically at the time of creating the new file?Is it store in the inode or special file created for directory?
what is different between the links and link count?

regard
Debakanata