On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 13:07 +0000, James Wilkinson wrote:
> The fact that it's the same for all three "files" means that all three
> directory entries (gunzip, gzip and zcat) point ("link") to the same
> on-disk inode, containing the same data (and, by extension, the same
> contents of the file).
>
> (An inode contains data about the file: see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inode for details).
>
> Note that for "normal" files, you'll still see an inode number: the
> way "normal" files are stored in disk is a single directory entry
> linking to an inode. Creating a "hard link" simply means creating more
> than one directory entry linking to an inode.
>
> In the above output and the "ll" output you listed above, the "1"
> after the "lrwxrwxrwx" means that the directory entry only has one
> link (and that's it). The "3" after the "-rwxr-xr-x" for the file
> means there are three hard links to the file (and you're looking at
> one of them).
>
> This is all standard Unix.
Thanks, most informative... I keep meaning to look into some of these
things, but don't seem to get around to it. For instance, the output of
some commands isn't described. It's obvious what some of the columns
refer to in the output from ls (file names, permissions, etc.), but
there's a few things in there I hadn't figured out.
Is there an easy way to format the output for your own purposes? I'm
thinking of cases for things like HTML generation. You'd list the
contents of a directory, inserting HTML around the filenames in a
particular manner, and you get a quick way of making a preview page for
a bunch of image files, etc.
--
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