Freedup walks through the file trees (directories) you specify.  When it
finds two identical files on the same device, it hard links them together.  
In this case two or more files still exist in their respective directories, 
but only one copy of the data is stored on disk; both directory entries 
point to the same data blocks.
If both files reside on different devices, then they are symlinked together
except there are relative paths given (and the -s option is unused).

	This allows you to reclaim space on your drive.  
	It's that simple.  Run it every night from a cron job.


How freedup works:
1) scan all directory trees recursively
2) build a list of all files and keep their name, lstat() and arg position
3) sort the files by comparing their sizes using qsort()
4) in case the comparison has to report equal file size
	 additional properties are compared
5) most property checks have to be added using command line options
6) if all demands are fullfilled, the files are compared 4k block by block
7) if both files are identical and on the same file system they will
	 be renamed, hard linked, renamed file removed.
8) if hardlinking is not possible soft links are tried, 
	 except one of the paths is not starting at root (can be forced)
9) sorting is repeated, the reason to do so was not checked yet
10) finally a short report is delivered


Directories to use it for the first time:
- Several versions of software contain identical files, e.g. linux kernel.
- You have multiple copies of the file COPYING in /usr/doc or /usr/share/DOC
- Depending on your system, the following might be good places
  to try linking (size in parentheses are RedHat 7.3 savings):
  freedup /lib/kbd					(463K)
  freedup /usr/doc /usr/share/doc
  freedup /usr/src/linux*
  freedup /usr/src/pcmcia-cs*
  freedup /usr/share					(8.6M)
  freedup /usr/lib					(97K)
  freedup /usr/man /usr/share/man
  freedup /usr/share/locale /etc/locale			(652K)
  freedup /usr/share/scrollkeeper /var/lib/scrollkeeper	(719K)
- Directories holding multimedia files are good candidates.



Frequently Asked Questions
There is an excellent FAQ section on William Stearns freedups page
	http://www.stearns.org/freedups/README
Please not that this a completely separate implementation, with other
means and other capabilities. The Main difference is the ability to 
provide symlinks from different file systems.


Contacts and credits.
	Please send comments, suggestions, bug reports, patches, and/or
additions to the filesystem or applications list to Andreas Neuper
<andreas@neuper.de> .


