1hardlink(1)                 General Commands Manual                hardlink(1)
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NAME

6       hardlink - Consolidate duplicate files via hardlinks
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SYNOPSIS

9       hardlink [options] [directory...]
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DESCRIPTION

12       This  manual  page  documents  hardlink,  a  program which consolidates
13       duplicate files in one or more directories using hardlinks.
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15       hardlink traverses one or  more  directories  searching  for  duplicate
16       files.   When it finds duplicate files, it uses one of them as the mas‐
17       ter.  It then removes all other duplicates and places  a  hardlink  for
18       each  one pointing to the master file.  This allows for conservation of
19       disk space where multiple directories on a  single  filesystem  contain
20       many duplicate files.
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22       Since  hard  links  can only span a single filesystem, hardlink is only
23       useful when all directories specified are on the same filesystem.
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OPTIONS

26       -c, --content
27              Compare only the contents of the files being considered for con‐
28              solidation.   Disregards permission, ownership and other differ‐
29              ences.
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31       -f, --force
32              Force hardlinking across file systems.
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34       -n, --dry-run
35              Do not perform the  consolidation;  only  print  what  would  be
36              changed.
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38       -v, --verbose
39              Print  summary  after  hardlinking.  The option may be specified
40              more than  once.  In  this  case  (e.g.  -vv)  it  prints  every
41              hardlinked file and bytes saved.
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43       -x, --exclude regex
44              Exclude files and directories matching pattern from hardlinking.
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46              The optional pattern for excluding files and directories must be
47              a PCRE2 compatible regular expression. Only the basename of  the
48              file  or  directory  is checked, not its path. Excluded directo‐
49              ries' contents will not be examined.
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51       -h, --help
52              Display help text and exit.
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54       -V, --version
55              Display version information and exit.
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AUTHOR

58       hardlink was written by Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com> and later mod‐
59       ified  by  Ruediger  Meier  <ruediger.meier@ga-group.nl>  and Karel Zak
60       <kzak@redhat.com> for util-linux.
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62       Man page written by Brian Long  and  later  updated  by  Jindrich  Novy
63       <jnovy@redhat.com>
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BUGS

66       hardlink  assumes  that  its  target directory trees do not change from
67       under it.  If a directory tree does change, this may result in hardlink
68       accessing  files  and/or  directories outside of the intended directory
69       tree.  Thus, you must avoid running hardlink  on  potentially  changing
70       directory  trees,  and  especially  on directory trees under control of
71       another user.
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73       Historically  hardlink  silently  excluded  any  names  beginning  with
74       ".in.",  as  well as any names beginning with "." followed by exactly 6
75       other characters. That prior behavior can be achieved by specifying
76       -x '^(\.in\.|\.[^.]{6}$)'
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AVAILABILITY

79       The hardlink command is part of the util-linux package and is available
80       from https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
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