Concerned about hard links

[steve]

Dave,

Thanks for your reassurance that unrolling hard links has not caused any trouble. I agree with your observation that ditto probably can't preserve links "across copy operations".

For fun, I checked to see how many hard links are in my OS X installations. My method was to find non-directory files with non-zero link counts, using commands like those below.

cd /Volumes/whatever
sudo find . ! -links 1 ! -type d | wc -l
sudo find . ! -links 1 ! -type d -ls > ~/desktop/'hardlinks.txt'

Hard links are pretty rare in 10.2.8, only 266 total.
/Library = 3
/System = 3 (these 3 are linked to the 3 in /Library)
/sbin = 4
/usr = 256

But 10.3.9 has lots more, 2839 total.
/Library = 3
/System = 3 (these 3 are linked to the 3 in /Library)
/usr/bin = 22
/usr/share/man = 1112
/usr/share/terminfo = 1478
/usr/share/zoneinfo = 221

I hope you find these results useful. It's been fun digging around in OS X's file system, but I'll quit bugging you now. Thanks for a fine product, and amazingly responsive support!

Steve