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  • Re: ?Hard links, Soft links, & Aliases--Explain

    From anno4000@anno4000@lublin.zrz.tu-berlin.de (Anno Siegel) to comp.sys.mac.system on Wednesday, July 02, 2003 12:17:07
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system

    Fred Moore <fmoore@gcfn.org> wrote in comp.sys.mac.system:
    Thanks, Jeremy and Tom! Just what I needed to know. Certainly didn't understand about multiple hard links being equal. Now I do.

    Fred Moore (fmoore@gcfn.org) wrote:
    : I'm pretty familiar with the ins and outs of Mac aliases; but the other
    : day I repaired a dual boot Mac using Norton booted into 9.2.2 and it
    : generated a file called Lost and Found containing a whole bunch of zero KB : items labeled 'Hardlink [some long numeric string]'.

    The numeric part is usually the inode number of the file.

    To follow up on these Lost and Found hardlinks, should I delete them?

    If you're sure *you* don't want them, delete them (but not the
    lost+found directory itself).

    Is the file system accessing them w/o names?

    No.

    How did they lose their names?

    Some file system malfunction. Could be hardware or software.

    And what might be in them?

    Anything. If a disk repair program (fschk, most notably) finds a file
    with no directory entry pointing to it, it places the file into the
    lost+found directory under a made-up name (the "Hardlink..." you saw).
    It is up to you to inspect the content (if any) and do with it as you
    please. If you happen to be able to identify a file in lost+found (a
    rare occurrence) you may be able to put it back where it belongs and
    save yourself some work.

    If you can't identify them you may as well delete them. The files are
    lost to the system anyhow, you won't make things worse than they already
    are.

    Anno
    --- Synchronet 3.18b-Win32 NewsLink 1.113
  • From fmoore@fmoore@gcfn.org (Fred Moore) to comp.sys.mac.system on Wednesday, July 02, 2003 10:33:22
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system

    Anno Siegel (anno4000@lublin.zrz.tu-berlin.de) wrote:
    [lots of informative stuff about hardlinks and lost and found]

    Thanks, Anno. Really helps me get a grip on this. I'll start inspecting
    the files to see what's in them.

    --Fred
    --- Synchronet 3.18b-Win32 NewsLink 1.113