File	Date	Author	Commit
debian	2014-08-23	Robert Kehl	[17545a] committing changes
INSTALL	2014-08-23	Robert Kehl	[4a7f90] moved to /usr/bin
LICENSE	2014-08-12	Robert Kehl	[3e154f] reworked docs, remove unneccassary files
README	2014-08-12	Robert Kehl	[3e154f] reworked docs, remove unneccassary files
TODO	2014-08-12	Robert Kehl	[3e154f] reworked docs, remove unneccassary files
hardlink	2014-08-12	Robert Kehl	[3e154f] reworked docs, remove unneccassary files

Read Me

# hardlink.pl - finding equal files and hard-linking them
#
# (c) 2010-2014 Robert Kehl <robertkehl@robertkehl.de>
#
# This script strives to find equal files of the same size and content residing
# on the same device and either hardlinks them or reduces the count of links to
# the file to one by deleting the other links. It can dramatically reduce the
# amount of space a needed to store identical files or even avoid having those
# identical on your storage.
#
# It was written for Cyrus mail spools, due to one reason: If a Cyrus mail
# server receives a mail for more than one target mailbox, a single mail is
# delivered and then hardlinked into the other mailboxes the mail was addressed
# to. This technique works well, but as soon as you begin to move mailboxes in
# a socalled Cyrus murder cluster back and forth between your mail servers, you
# will notice a significant increase of needed storage to store the exact same
# amount of mails, deriving from the need to break up the former hard links. By
# using this script you can hard link the emails again - or potentially new
# ones on the destination Cyrus system.
#
# You can also use it on a bunch of downloaded images, ISOs, software packages,
# whatever you like. Just be aware that the result will be identical files. So,
# if you have an identical picture in two directories and hard link it, it will
# actually be the same inode the file points to. If you tag the image in one
# directory, the other one will receive the same tags. This might not be what
# you want, so think first, link later.
#
# This software can also be used to reduce the amount of (not yet) hard-linked,
# identical files by simply deleting copies instead of hard linking them.
#
# The homepage of this software can be found on SourceForge.net:
#   http://sourceforge.net/projects/hardlinkpl/
#
# Based upon an idea of John Villalovos <john@sodarock.com>, who implemented
# this on Python, but his hardlink.py fails with a large amount of files:
#   http://code.google.com/p/hardlinkpy/
#
# The original idea came from Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com> and was written
# in C back in 2001:
#   https://fedorahosted.org/hardlink/browser/hardlink.c
#
# Please use this software at your own risk. I cannot ensure that it does what
# you want it to do. You must understand that this software can severely
# damage your systems, even if it is used correctly and is working correctly. 
# In now way shall I be hold liable for any causes the use of this software
# may have. If you don't agree to this, you must not use the software.
#
# This project is issued under the GPL v3 license or later, see:
#   http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt