Is there a quick way/function to enum all hardlinks of a file? Something that directly gives me the paths of all hardlinks to a given file? On windows if that matters any.
I know about os.stat("foo.txt").st_nlink and about os.path.samefile(path1, path2).
Using these I can probably bodge together something to enumerate all hardlinks of a given file. Welcome to implementation suggestions tho.
On Windows, enumeration of hardlinks to any given file is facilitated by the FindFirstFileName, FindNextFileName, and FindClose trio. Fortunately, pywin32 wraps these for us in a single call:
import win32file
hardlinks = win32file.FindFileNames(r'path\as\string')
Less fortunately, FindFileNames() only accepts string input and leaves a trailing null on each path returned (bug reported here). We can easily make up for this and return more helpful pathlib.Path objects while we're at it:
import os
from pathlib import Path
from typing import Union, List
from win32file import FindFileNames
def enumerate_hardlinks(path: Union[bytes, str, Path]) -> List[Path]:
def strip_null(p):
return p[:-1] if p.endswith('\x00') else p
# Convert possible path representations to a string.
path = os.fsdecode(os.fspath(path))
return [Path(strip_null(n)) for n in FindFileNames(path)]
To verify output, you can also enumerate all hardlinks to a file using fsutil from both Windows CMD and PowerShell:
>fsutil hardlink list C:\Users\name\1st
\Users\name\1st
\Users\name\2nd
\Users\name\3rd
Where 1st, 2nd, & 3rd are all hardlinks to the same file.
(Tested using Python 3.8 and pywin32 v227)
