Hard links are tags. A file is just a big lump of data with an address(the inode) A name is then linked to the data(If you wanted you could call it a tag, it

Hard links are tags. A file is just a big lump of data with an address(the inode) A name is then linked to the data(If you wanted you could call it a tag, it is almost exactly the same thing). If the data needs more metadata go ahead and link additional names to it. Note that no name is the "real name" with hard links they are all equal. I built a whole music database once where all the metadata and playlists were hardlinks... The main problem encountered was you had to be very careful archiving the structure, it tended to explode into a million duplicate files(this is probably why people don't use hardlinks)