Cfengine will also allow you to create hard links to regular files. A
hard link is in every way identical to the original file, it merely has
a different name (technically, it is a duplicate inode). To create a
hard link you use the link-option type=hard. For example:
links: /directory/newname -> /directory/othername type=hard
Cfengine will not create hard links to directories or other special files. This is always a slightly dubious practice and is best avoided anyway. POSIX says that the hard link can be on a different device to the file it points to, but both BSD and System 5 restrict hard links to be on the same device as their predecessors. Cfengine has no policy on this, but--in the theoretical case in which the hard link and the predecessor were on different file systems--it becomes near impossible to determine with certainly between a hard link and a very similar regular file, and thus cfengine issues a warning in verbose mode about this eventuality. Provided both link and predecessor are on the same filesystem cfengine determines the status of hard links by comparing the device and inode numbers of the file pointed to.
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.