On Wed, 3 Jan 2007, Miklos Szeredi wrote:

quoted text
>>> High probability is all you have.  Cosmic radiation hitting your
>>> computer will more likly cause problems, than colliding 64bit inode
>>> numbers ;)
>>
>> Some of us have machines designed to cope with cosmic rays, and would be
>> unimpressed with a decrease in reliability.
>
> With the suggested samefile() interface you'd get a failure with just
> about 100% reliability for any application which needs to compare a
> more than a few files.  The fact is open files are _very_ expensive,
> no wonder they are limited in various ways.
>
> What should 'tar' do when it runs out of open files, while searching
> for hardlinks?  Should it just give up?  Then the samefile() interface
> would be _less_ reliable than the st_ino one by a significant margin.

You could do samefile() for paths --- as for races --- it doesn't matter 
in this scenario, it is no more racy than stat or lstat.

Mikulas

quoted text
> Miklos
>
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