Hi, pelibali wrote:
Hi,
I would have another question in (not so tight) relation to this topic. While checking files/folders on my SUSE 9.1 system, I realized, that many times happens, that there are files with the same size and same md5sum and they are really two separated files. I mean named differently, but stored still in the same folder. Is there a security reason or in fact why is this method better and not just link one to another as e.g. the case is for python-related stuff: -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5812 2005-02-05 17:23 /usr/bin/python2.3 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2005-03-19 23:29 /usr/bin/python -> python2.3
This is a softlink. -> man ln (option -s)
I would say, it's OK, even that the above files are tiny. But there are several others as:
package 'automake' -rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 220546 2004-11-15 13:04 /usr/bin/automake-1.9 -rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 220546 2004-11-15 13:04 /usr/bin/automake or -rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 20632 2004-11-15 13:04 /usr/bin/aclocal-1.9 -rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 20632 2004-11-15 13:04 /usr/bin/aclocal
These are hardlinks. Also: man ln
And additionally for the following two pairs at least 2Mb could be saved, because they are _big_:
package 'perl' /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl5.8.3
/usr/bin/sperl5.8.3 /usr/bin/suidperl
;) hardlinks too
So the brief question is, why is it better to keep two copies of completely same file?
It _is_ the same file ;) Try to use "ls -i" (This shows the inode number, which shows that these files are identical and only once on the disk ;)
Thank you and have a nice weekend, Pelibali
Read a good book about Linux/UNIX administration. You will find some useful and interesting things! ;)) Cheers, Ingo -- Ingo Börnig <ingo at boernig.de> /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign ask for phone or snail mail X against HTML email / \ GPG-Fingerprint: 2F8B DDFB F2A8 155A 206D 2969 F8FB 3C63 2033 BF32