Hard Links between UNIX Utility Programs

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <184 at chip.UUCP> mparker at chip.UUCP (M. D. Parker) writes:
>I have noticed the tendency for some programs in UNIX to have hard links.
>The program operation is then determined by the name it was invoked by.
>As a system administrator this makes it very difficult for me to restrict
>one program without restricting all their linked set.  And the problems
>is not just simply removing the hard link, since experimentations have
>proved that symbolic links do the same.  Thereby preventing restriction
>again.

The file permissions are stored in the inodes, and to get another inode
you have to duplicate the data...

Starting with link-a and link-b as two different links to the same file:

rm link-b
cp link-a link-b

Now the files are no longer linked and you can chown/chmod independently.
Unfortunately, you also use extra disk space for each copy and do not
gain the advantage of shared-text when multiple copies are running when
invoked by the different names.

Les Mikesell