cs-app-mklinks 20250530
Tool for finding and hardlinking identical files.
Keywords: python2, python3

mklinks: tool for finding and hardlinking identical files

*Latest release 20250530*:
Big refactor to use cs.hashindex for the content checks and better internal data structures.

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 oldest 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.

Short summary:
* `Inode`: Information about a particular inode.
* `Linker`: The class which links files with identical content.
* `main`: CLI for `mklinks`.
* `MKLinksCommand`: Hard link files with identical contents.

Module contents:
- <a name="Inode"></a>`Class `Inode(cs.fs.HasFSPath, cs.deco.Promotable)``: Information about a particular inode.

*`Inode.assimilate(self, other: 'Inode', *, dry_run=False, runstate: Optional[cs.resources.RunState] = <function uses_runstate.<locals>.<lambda> at 0x10b75c220>)`*:
Link our primary path to all the paths from `other`. Return success.

*`Inode.from_str(fspath: str, *, hashname: str)`*:
Promote a filesystem path to an `Inode`.

*`Inode.key`*:
A `(ino,dev)` 2-tuple.

*`Inode.same_dev(self, other)`*:
Test whether two `Inode`s are on the same filesystem.

*`Inode.same_file(self, other)`*:
Test whether two `Inode`s refer to the same file.

*`Inode.samefs(self, other)`*:
Test whether 2 `Inode`'s are on the same filesystem (same `.dev` values).

*`Inode.stat_key(fspath: str)`*:
Compute the `(ino,dev)` 2-tuple from `os.stat(fspath)`.
- <a name="Linker"></a>`Class `Linker``: The class which links files with identical content.

*`Linker.addpath(self, path)`*:
Add a new path to the data structures.

*`Linker.merge(self, *, dry_run=False, runstate: Optional[cs.resources.RunState] = <function uses_runstate.<locals>.<lambda> at 0x10b75cd60>)`*:
Merge files with equivalent content.

*`Linker.scan(self, path, *, runstate: Optional[cs.resources.RunState] = <function uses_runstate.<locals>.<lambda> at 0x10b75c900>)`*:
Scan the file tree.
- <a name="main"></a>`main(argv=None)`: CLI for `mklinks`.
- <a name="MKLinksCommand"></a>`Class `MKLinksCommand(cs.cmdutils.BaseCommand)``: Hard link files with identical contents.

  Usage summary:

      Usage: mklinks [common-options...] subcommand [options...]
        Hard link files with identical contents.

*`MKLinksCommand.Options`*

*`MKLinksCommand.main(self, argv)`*:
Usage: {cmd} paths...
Hard link files with identical contents.

# Release Log



*Release 20250530*:
Big refactor to use cs.hashindex for the content checks and better internal data structures.

*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.