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Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2000 03:38:35 -0800 (PST)
From: Nate Eldredge <neldredge AT hmc DOT edu>
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To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
cc: Alain Magloire <alain AT qnx DOT com>
Subject: Re: DJGPP innovations ?????
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On Sun, 5 Mar 2000, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> In all fairness, M$ is doing more than just symlinks: it also has some 
> daemon program running in the background and actively looking for files 
> that can be replaced by links to other files, thus freeing the disk 
> space.
> 
> IMHO, this is going to be one of those ``features'' people would love to 
> turn off (e.g., what happens if you delete the sole copy of the file 
> after the daemon linked half a dozen other files to it: does Windows then 
> go back and automagically restore the original file it replaced with a 
> link?).

Presumably it would be more like Unix hard links, where there is just a
link count.  So the file disappears only when the last link is deleted.
But you'd also need something like copy-on-write to deal with one of the
files being modified, if you wanted it to be transparent.