Moving a file after add —nocopy

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1

I was wondering how the filestore is implemented. What happens is you move a file after doing an IPFS add —nocopy ?

2

Then the file cannot be accessed by IPFS any longer.

When you run filestore verify you’ll get the no-file error message.

3

But you can readd the file on the new location, IPFS will detect that it’s the same content and reuse it for the same CID.

4

Thanks, that makes sense and I can see why you’d want to do that but it would be cool if there was an option to reference it by inode like a hard link.

5

Accessing files directly by inode number is not possible in any stable way and the alternatives are both non-portable and require special privileges. That said the hard-link idea would be very easy to perform manually: Just create the hard-link yourself to a known protected directory (like ${IPFS_PATH:-~/.ipfs}/filestore-links?) and tell IPFS filestore it in from there.

Caveats:

  1. Unpinning the file from IPFS does not delete the hard-link, some extra tracking would be needed for that.
  2. As usual for hard-links, modifying the content of the file at the original location, still invalidate its content in filestore as it currently does.