"(Note: hardlinking of files is only an optimization - there are times when files must be projected by copying them.)
Using "dir /s" to compute the size of the winsxs directory will report every file and its size. Unfortunately, "dir" doesn't know how to deal with hard links, so it reports the total file size by summing the size of each name, not summing the size of the used disk space. This isn't a bug in dir, per-se. In NTFS, there is no such thing as the "first" link to a file, so there's no way to determine whether or not a file's size should be included in a scan."
http://blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/archives ... 32008.html
"Fsutil: hardlink
A hard link is a directory entry for a file. Every file can be considered to have at least one hard link. On NTFS volumes, each file can have multiple hard links, and thus a single file can appear in many directories (or even in the same directory with different names). Because all of the links reference the same file, programs can open any of the links and modify the file. A file is deleted from the file system only after all links to it have been deleted. After you create a hard link, programs can use it like any other file name."
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/docu ... dlink.mspx
"Once two files are linked together, you cannot determine which is the original file and which is the copy. This is because both file records will point to the same data on disk, and the pointer is a one-way link. The only information you can get about a linked file is the link count for that file, and the file index number, which is a 64-bit value that uniquely identifies that file on that volume. "
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/106166
"Hard link uses the same MFT entry as the original file. Adding a hard link creates a new name attribute and increases the hard link count (for a newly created file this count equals to one). Deleting a hard link removes the appropriate name and decreases the hard link count. When the count goes to zero, the system deletes the file, freeing up its allocated disk space and releasing its MFT record. All the name attributes are independent, so deleting, moving, or renaming the file don't affect other hard links. "
http://www.flexhex.com/docs/articles/hard-links.phtml
^
|
And with a link (& a "hard" link being what I would typically consider an UNIX
link <ln>) it would be expected that Everything would only find one instance of the file. But what is not expected is that "junction" like utilities do not see these "hard links" - unless they are not made to see them, but only other types of links?
(Heh. And what was this thread about, Bug list for 1.2.1.371? Sorry about that.)