Symbolic Links taking up space?!
 

Why would a Symbolic Link take up room?

We have Red Hat Linux v 7.2 and have about 1 million symbolic links pointing to seperate data files on another box that we are NFS'ed to... The Symbolic links seem to be taking up room on the system it's self. Any ideas? Is there any way around this?


Thanks!

Re: Symbolic Links taking up space?!
 

Sure, not much -- nowhere near what having a duplicate copy of the file would take -- but some resources.


Ummm, you could delete them, I doubt that this would be a very good idea, but it would get rid of them... :)


John

everything takes up space... i just did a short test... a link on my system from one file to another takes up 9 bytes... i think it varies from link to link tho.

If you have that many links you would save space by having your ext2 block size at 1k

the default is 4k for some systems

Block size
 

I don't suppose that the block size can be changed without loosing my data on that parition, could it?

If I had caught this early on, before the disk was so full, it would have been better, but now, the data is just too much to resolve this problem easely...

No way to backup and restore?

Symbolic links
 

Backup and restore would cost money, as my systems are hosted by an ISP. My backup really consists of another system that gets data copied to it...

Back to the origonal problem with Symbolic Links taking up room, it would seem that based on my calcluations my symbolic links are taking up about 9K each. The filesystem was setup with defaults which should be 4 k blocks?... any ideas?

someone with 1k blocks may be able to test it, I believe you are seeing a file size of 8192.

you could save somewhere between 0 and 3072 per link