4 ms·

In my unscientific trial, it looks like the hard link is an order of magnitude faster. Still, it takes time. $ du -sh README.markdown 4.0K README.markdown

• lisper 17y ago
  That's pretty unscientific :-) To measure anything that fast reliably you have to do it more than once: [ron@mickey:~/foo]$ cat foo foo [ron@mickey:~/foo]$ time for i in {1..1000}; do cp foo foo.c.$i; done real 0m2.705s user 0m0.524s sys 0m2.190s [ron@mickey:~/foo]$ time for i in {1..1000}; do ln foo foo.l.$i; done real 0m2.618s user 0m0.486s sys 0m2.008s
  • jrockway 17y ago
    Now you are measuring the speed of the fork/exec call. To really do this right you need to write a small script that copies the file 1000 times or creates a hard link 1000 times.
    • lisper 17y ago
      No, fork is a lot faster than disk I/O: [ron@mickey:~]$ time for i in {1..1000}; do echo foo>/dev/null; done real 0m0.064s user 0m0.039s sys 0m0.025s