Re: why it has the hard links?

Please don't top-post.

On 2007-04-24, Stephen SM WONG <wongsm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If you want to remove sensitive information from your hard
disk, you better follow those CIA/FBI/NSA data destroy
standards! Deleting a file from a Unix filesystem is
nothing more than marking some disk sectors free for reuse!
Rewriting a file on a journal file system will not overwrite
old data immediately. And CIA/FBI/NSA are believed to be
able to recover data from hard disk eventhough those sectors
are rewritten.

I am aware of all of the above. What if (say) all I want to do is make
sure that no hard links exist to a potentially confusing config file for
some daemon that I'm no longer running? Sure, I could look in every
obvious place for said file, but what if I forget one?

Anyway, if you want to find all hard links, you can use
"-inum" with "find". Of you can use "-samefile" to find
both hard and soft links.

I am aware of finding a file by inode with find. Running such a command
on a 2TB filesystem would be frustrating, to say the least. locate
could help in this instance, but it's still no assurance that I've found
every link to a given inode. Thus (bringing the thread back a little
bit) one reason why I tend to use symlinks more often than hard links
(though obviously if someone else has created a hard link I'm still
b0rked).

--keith

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