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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | BUGS | AUTHORS | AVAILABILITY | COLOPHON |
hardlink(1) General Commands Manual hardlink(1)
hardlink - Consolidate duplicate files via hardlinks
hardlink [options] [directory...]
This manual page documents hardlink, a program which consolidates
duplicate files in one or more directories using hardlinks.
hardlink traverses one or more directories searching for duplicate
files. When it finds duplicate files, it uses one of them as the
master. It then removes all other duplicates and places a hardlink
for each one pointing to the master file. This allows for
conservation of disk space where multiple directories on a single
filesystem contain many duplicate files.
Since hard links can only span a single filesystem, hardlink is only
useful when all directories specified are on the same filesystem.
-c, --content
Compare only the contents of the files being considered for
consolidation. Disregards permission, ownership and other
differences.
-f, --force
Force hardlinking across file systems.
-n, --dry-run
Do not perform the consolidation; only print what would be
changed.
-v, --verbose
Print summary after hardlinking. The option may be specified
more than once. In this case (e.g., -vv) it prints every
hardlinked file and bytes saved.
-x, --exclude regex
Exclude files and directories matching pattern from
hardlinking.
The optional pattern for excluding files and directories must
be a PCRE2 compatible regular expression. Only the basename of
the file or directory is checked, not its path. Excluded
directories' contents will not be examined.
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
-V, --version
Display version information and exit.
hardlink assumes that its target directory trees do not change from
under it. If a directory tree does change, this may result in
hardlink accessing files and/or directories outside of the intended
directory tree. Thus, you must avoid running hardlink on potentially
changing directory trees, and especially on directory trees under
control of another user.
Historically hardlink silently excluded any names beginning with
".in.", as well as any names beginning with "." followed by exactly 6
other characters. That prior behavior can be achieved by specifying
-x '^(\.in\.|\.[^.]{6}$)'
hardlink was written by Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com> and later
modified by Ruediger Meier <ruediger.meier@ga-group.nl> and Karel Zak
<kzak@redhat.com> for util-linux.
Man page written by Brian Long and later updated by Jindrich Novy
<jnovy@redhat.com>
The hardlink command is part of the util-linux package and is
available from https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
This page is part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux
utilities) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have a
bug report for this manual page, send it to
util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
project's upstream Git repository
⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
2020-08-13. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that
was found in the repository was 2020-08-12.) If you discover any
rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe
there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
hardlink(1)