Feature Request for hard link support
Status: Beta
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#9 Feature Request for hard link support
I setup smbnetfs 0.5.3a on an old laptop that is running getmail (http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/) to do email backups for different users and to store the backups onto individual smb shares. The smbnetfs setup successfully, but when I ran the getmail program, it failed when trying to generate hard-links between backup email files. Getmail is writen in Python so it uses the "os.link" call, but any call to make a hard link, including the 'ln' command, fails. The error message says that the link function is not implemented.
I was able to put in a work-around for getmail, but the getmail developers recommended I file a feature request upstream with you. Is there a big problem that prevents making hard links via FUSE, or is this just on the todo list? Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help.
it's not possible for two reasons:
1) smbnetfs is based on libsmbclient code that does not support hardlinks (more generally samba protocol does not support hardlinks (correct me if i am mistake), also hardlink is not supported on FAT filesysmem that is quite common for MS Windows)
2) i can emulate hardlink creation with simple file copying. It will require coping all file data to your computer and back. This is not reasonable for large files,