Does Ipfs pull complete block when we do `ipfs refs -r <CID>` or `ipfs object stat <CID>`

1

Let’s assume I have only the parent-hash and ipfs --offline refs -r <CID> returns False for it.

Now I want to only obtains its hashes that are returned from ipfs refs -r <CID>.

As I know when we apply ipfs ls <CID> it pulls the complete data files/blocks from the network.

Instead when we apply ipfs refs -r <CID> does it still still pull the complete data files from the network on only small amount of data such as few kilobytes in order to figure out its refs?

2

If you do ipfs refs -r then yes, you will need to pull all blocks to get their links. MerkleDag objects roughy look like

// An IPFS MerkleDAG Link
message IPLDLink {
    // multihash of the target object
    bytes hash = 1;
    // utf string name. should be unique per object
    string name = 2;
    // cumulative size of target object
    uint64 size = 3;
}
  
// An IPFS MerkleDAG Node
message IPLDNode {
    // refs to other objects
    repeated IPLDLink links = 2;
    // opaque user data
    bytes data = 1;
}

IF you run ipfs object stat then I believe you just need to fetch the first block, but I’m not entirely certain

3

If you use ipfs ls --resolve-type=false --size=false it will not pull the data.

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