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  • Good point, but a bit too tangential to be good answer. Commented Jun 25, 2016 at 3:21
  • @Joe: Allowing hard links to cross file systems would impose a number of technical difficulties, but most of them could be overcome, thus raising the question of whether there's any compelling reason why they shouldn't be. The keep-alive issue may seem obscure, but unlike the other issues it can only me resolved by imposing severe semantic restrictions on the usage of such links, which would severely limit their value. Commented Jun 25, 2016 at 13:15
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    Good point. A filesystem can be mounted on another device and modified, so the inode and links can get "out of sync". Every filesystem could have a GUID and the link could incorporate that GUID to track the inode across filesystems. There could also be some sort of log on the FS and then when it is mounted, the host system would not need to scan it but could just read the log and "catch up" on the inode linking changes (When do we clear it, though?). Bottom line is the underlying FS would need to be modified in non-trivial ways and it would only work across compatible filesystems. Commented Feb 20, 2018 at 12:54