am regularly amazed that we pretend folders are the right way to organise files. They’re entirely arbitrary. Every competent file system ignores them to its best ability. Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”? Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension?

We’ve been played for absolute fools.

  • frongt@lemmy.zip
    0·
    1 month ago

    No, in nearly every case, you never want a hard link. You want one file, and symlinks to it. (Technically every file is a hard link to an inode, and subsequent ones are just additional links to the same inode.) In ext4, you can’t easily get a list of links to an inode, you have to scan the filesystem and look for duplicates. Other filesystems might make this easier.

    You shouldn’t try to use a tree filesystem to approximate a tagged database. Use the appropriate tool for the job.

    • hallettj@leminal.spaceEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      That’s not an unreasonable answer. But I find this thread a little frustrating. As I see it, it’s gone like this:

      • phpinjected: Why don’t I have a tool to do these non-hierarchical things?
      • frongt: You already have a tool that does those specific things.
      • hallettj: What could change to make that tool better suited for those non-hierarchical / tagging things?
      • frongt: Don’t use that tool to do tagging things. It’s the wrong tool.

      Why bring up hard links if people shouldn’t use them for the requested use case? I mean, I do think your original reply was interesting and relevant as a starting point to get to what I think OP has in mind. But that line of thinking does require getting into how to use hard links for a non-hierarchical workflow.

      I feel like OP was trying to start a discussion about what might be, if things were different. I tried to reply in the same spirit. I feel like I’m asking, “What if things were different?”, and I’m being told “It doesn’t work that way.” Which doesn’t feel like an especially helpful response to me.

      • hoppolito@mander.xyzEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        I mean there are better tools, such as TMSU or tagfs, which i think are actually better approaches to having (part of) your file system displayed in a non-hierarchical way - or rather in a dynamic hierarchy.

        But the other poster is also right in that for your system file system, i.e. root and operating-system critical paths, do not benefit from such an approach. I think asking for such a thing kind of sounds like an XY problem and requires listing the actual problems to solve with an alternative approach first.