Only if its the last hard link. If nothing else, its a wee bit of insurance from deletion since no single link removal should remove the file.
Anecdote, eons ago, we had a problem where the vendor needed to log in to the machine with the intent that they were going to upload some utilities, fix a problem, and then delete them.
Before I let them in, I set up a script that constantly scanned the directory tree they were in, and hard linked everything so I could look at what they were using later.
That's a problem with directory hardlinks: a recursive deletion will wipe the directory (in the same way that truncate will destroy a file regardless of how many hardlinks it has). But we don't usually allow directory hardlinks these days.
that isn't generally how hardlinks work: you need to delete all instances of it to delete the file, as opposed to having one 'real' file like with symlinks.
Comments
Main thing I've seen with hard links is that deletions delete the source file which about 90% of the time isn't what an end user wants
Only if its the last hard link. If nothing else, its a wee bit of insurance from deletion since no single link removal should remove the file.
Anecdote, eons ago, we had a problem where the vendor needed to log in to the machine with the intent that they were going to upload some utilities, fix a problem, and then delete them.
Before I let them in, I set up a script that constantly scanned the directory tree they were in, and hard linked everything so I could look at what they were using later.
Clever solution!
That's a problem with directory hardlinks: a recursive deletion will wipe the directory (in the same way that truncate will destroy a file regardless of how many hardlinks it has). But we don't usually allow directory hardlinks these days.
that isn't generally how hardlinks work: you need to delete all instances of it to delete the file, as opposed to having one 'real' file like with symlinks.
It's more of a problem that changes to one linked file change the only copy. But this depends on your filesystem. Not all work this way.