[PLUG] too many identical md5sums - is this normal?

[Paul Heinlein]

On Sat, 11 Sep 2010, website reader wrote:

> In running md5sums against my files, I found in my home folder that 
> 522 files had the same identical md5sum (of the 176K+ files) but 
> when I did a search, they were not the same files, in fact most are 
> different from each other.
>
> Is this normal, that 522 different files give identical md5sums? I 
> have another set of files with 191 identical md5sums.

My first inclination would be to think that the files are hard-linked 
to one another. Do "ls -i" against some of the files with the same 
checksum. If the inode number is the same, that's the answer.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> www.madboa.com