Re: Way to bypass or disable for ls hard link highlighting

[Kamil Dudka]

On Friday 20 of March 2009 12:15:34 Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Wes Morgan wrote:
> > The new "hard link" highlighting would be nicer if it was optional. I
> > have lots of files with an "original" name that are also hard links to a
> > canonicalized version in another directory hierarchy. Instead of showing
> > the original coloring based on the extension, they show the hard link
> > coloring. Perhaps a special code for dircolors that tells "ls" to ignore
> > a class of highlighting and continue searching for another match.
>
> That change was made recently:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2008-10/msg00172.html
> Kamil indicated in that bug report that existing colors should take
> precedence over the hardlink color. This is the case for executable files
> for example, but not files whose color depends on name.

Only security-important attributes are preferred before hard links. In any 
other cases the behavior is equivalent to symbolic link. I propose a one-line 
patch like this:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commitdiff;h=f3f1ccfd871ee395e7fafc051c1b7dedb39fdfc9

With the patch user can choose to not highlight hardlinks in his own profile.

IMHO it's not common to distribute Linux (or any other systems) with tons
of hard-linked files. The hard links are mostly created by user. It should be 
visible at first glance if the file is hard-linked unintentionally (e.g. by 
omitting -s option of ln).

The patch will be ready next week. Also any other ideas are welcome.

Kamil