mklinks: tool for finding and hardlinking identical files

Latest release 20221228:

• Modernise command, pass a RunState to the merge methods.
• merge: check runstate more frequently, tweak progress bar.
• assimilate: plumb runstate.

Mklinks walks supplied paths looking for files with the same content, based on a cryptographic checksum of their content. It hardlinks all such files found, keeping the newest version.

Unlike some rather naive tools out there, mklinks only compares files with other files of the same size, and is hardlink aware - a partially hardlinked tree is processed efficiently and correctly.

Class FileInfo

Information about a particular inode.

Method FileInfo.__init__(self, dev, ino, size, mtime, paths=()): pylint: disable=too-many-arguments

Class Linker

The class which links files with identical content.

Function main(argv=None)

Main command line programme.

Class MKLinksCmd(cs.cmdutils.BaseCommand)

Main programme command line class.

Command line usage:

Usage: mklinkscmd paths...
          Hard link files with identical contents.
          -n    No action. Report proposed actions.

Release Log

Release 20221228:

• Modernise command, pass a RunState to the merge methods.
• merge: check runstate more frequently, tweak progress bar.
• assimilate: plumb runstate.

Release 20210404:

• FileInfo.checksum: bump read size to 1MiB.
• Requirements bump to match cs.cmdutils change.

Release 20210401: Major bugfix: subdirectory file paths were computed incorrectly.

Release 20210306: Use cs.cmdutils.BaseCommand for main programme, add better progress reporting.

Release 20171228: Initial PyPI release of cs.app.mklinks.