bk relink(7.3ce) BitKeeper User's Manual bk relink(7.3ce) NAME bk relink - recreate broken hard links SYNOPSIS bk relink [-q] <from> [<from2 ...>] <to> bk relink [-q] DESCRIPTION The relink command is used to conserve disk space. It is typical for a single user to have many repositories, each one representing a differ- ent work in progress. It is also typical to use the "-l" option to bk clone to create hard-linked repositories. A hard-linked repository uses much less space than a copied repository. As files are modified, the links are broken. As the same set of changes come into a set of repositories, the links could be restored. That is what the relink command does. The relink command looks at each BitKeeper file in the <from> reposi- tory and if it is the same as the same file in the <to> repository, it replaces the file in the <from> repository with a hard link to the file in the <to> repository. If no repositories are specified, then <from> defaults to the current repository and <to> defaults to all parent[s] of the current reposi- tory. OPTIONS -q Run quietly. WARNINGS While hard-linked repositories are less disk intensive than replicated repositories, they are also more vulnerable to disk or file system cor- ruption. It is advisable to always have at least one recent copy of a repository, rather than 100% hard-linked repositories. It is possible to break all the links by recomputing the per file checksums: bk repocheck bk -A admin -z NOTE This command works only on filesystems which support hard links, and only if both repositories are in the same file system. On recent (2014) versions of Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions), the use of hardlinks has been curtailed for security reasons. See http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc.5.html and search for pro- tected_hardlinks. The relink command will fail in this case. SEE ALSO bk clone CATEGORY Repository BitKeeper Inc 1E1 bk relink(7.3ce)