Skip to main content
11 events
when toggle format what by license comment
Aug 22, 2022 at 12:59 comment added mistige Expanding on John1024's answer, here's a script which lists all the files that have multiple hardlinks with a counter in first column, the inode-nr in the second, and other 'ls' output at the end, helping to determine the scope of the hardlinks [[[ find ./ -type f -exec find . -samefile {} -ls \; | sort -rn | uniq -c | sort -rn ]]]
Nov 11, 2021 at 12:00 comment added pgr Thank you for the extra info, very useful. For me, this raises an additional question - how to find which files/dirs have links that I should care about (as opposed to default ones), and which are they exactly? Maybe answering those questions is too complex for a one-liner, and would require a script.
Nov 10, 2021 at 22:25 comment added John1024 @pgr I just this documented online and updated the answer to include the information. Thanks for mentioning this!
Nov 10, 2021 at 22:24 history edited John1024 CC BY-SA 4.0
added 815 characters in body
Nov 10, 2021 at 22:11 comment added John1024 @pgr As counted by ls -al, every directory has a minimum of two links: itself and .. In addition, if it has subdirectories, then every subdirectory has a file .. that is a hard link back to its parent directory. Thus, according to ls -al, a directory with two subdirectories has a total of four hard links. By contrast, find / -samefile does not include the . and .. directories in its count.
Nov 9, 2021 at 18:55 comment added pgr What could be a reason for the following behaviour? ls -al shows var/www/html/logs to have 4 links to it. I run find / -samefile /var/www/html/logs as user root and it shows me only one entry, not 4... what gives?
Jan 30, 2018 at 17:01 comment added reinierpost Of course. You're listing entries in directories. You need read access to those directories in order to list them.
Jan 16, 2018 at 6:55 comment added Aaron Brick The result of this query is incomplete for users lacking privileges on the directories that contain the hard links.
May 7, 2015 at 3:25 vote accept Tim
May 7, 2015 at 2:57 history edited John1024 CC BY-SA 3.0
added 331 characters in body
May 7, 2015 at 2:52 history answered John1024 CC BY-SA 3.0