a future project: hardlink identical files

[Skaperen]

symlinks don't operate exactly like the object it references.  for example, you can disable following symlinks and easily discover that it is a symlink and get the string of what the symlink references.  hardlinks are purely symmetrical.  if file "foo" and file "bar" are hardlinked, they now reference the same inode and share the same inode number.  there is no information of which link (reference) existed first.  the inode has a count of how many links to it there are.  data does not get de-allocated until that count falls to zero.  hardlinking directories has many fundamental problems and this is generally disallowed.  hardlinking other things generally works OK.