[Info-vax] Hard links on VMS ODS5 disks

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 7/13/2023 9:25 AM, bill wrote:
> On 7/13/2023 1:50 AM, gah4 wrote:
>> On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 3:46:45 PM UTC-7, Steven Schweda wrote:
>>>> [...] For example, gzip, gunzip, zcat, and gzcat, are all the
>>>> same file, but do different things based on argv[0].
>>> Common in the past, but the GNU folks decided against that scheme
>>> some time ago. (At least a dozen years?)

>> A MacBook Air with OS 10.12.6 has two different files, not linked,
>> but with exactly the same contents.
>>
>> ls -li compress uncompress
>> 421074 -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  27680 Jul 14  2017 compress
>> 421907 -rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  27680 Jul 14  2017 uncompress
>> and cmp -l shows that they are the same.
>>
>> FreeBSD does use the hard links, and also Linux.
>> The Linux system is 13 years old, so doesn't disagree with your dozen 
>> years.
> 
> Which is yet another example of "throw more hardware at the problem".
> A link would save the space, but who cares.

We can discuss the optimal choice between:
* paying more dollars to get bigger disk
* the complexity of programs with multiple behavior depending on name

But I don't think that is the case here. I think the case is that
the cheapest disk you can buy for new systems are so big that there
is enough space, so no money is saved by adding the complexity of
multiple behaviors.

Arne