Hello,
On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 08:36:59PM -0700, David Christensen wrote:
> Is anyone aware of a utility that can walk a file system and replace
> identical files with hard links?
As an alternative to doing this, you could consider using a
filesystem with block-level de-duplication support.
ZFS and btrfs can do this online, though that uses a very large
amount of memory. btrfs and recently XFS can do it offline, which
means that you trigger it at a time of your choosing.
Support in XFS only arrived in kernel version 4.9.1, and is still
marked as experimental. The kernel in jessie-backports right now is
new enough. I did a write up a while ago about experimenting with
this in XFS:
http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2017/01/10/xfs-reflinks-and-deduplication/
Cheers,
Andy
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