March 2008 Archives

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a script; life has been distracting lately. I also wanted to let this current script mature a lot more before sharing it, as it has the potential to be destructive. Use wisely!

It’s name is linkdups, and it’s a Python program to recursively walk through a directory tree and hard-links any files together whose contents match exactly. That means that if you have two files, each taking up 10 Kb, afterwards they will be linked to the same contents for a total savings of 10 Kb.

There has been a small debate among some Mac users about whether defragmenting your disks is necessary for the smooth operation of OS X. I’ve always been in the camp of those who do it regularly, because I’ve seen what my disk ends up looking like after a few weeks of not doing it (and how pretty the graph looks afterwards). It could all be psychological, but I find the progress bar rather hypnotizing, and my wife has been known to find me staring at it for hours on end. Ok, very psychological.

Well, I’ve found one circumstance where defragmentation is definitively helpful: compressing sparse disk images.