am regularly amazed that we pretend folders are the right way to organise files. They’re entirely arbitrary. Every competent file system ignores them to its best ability. Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”? Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension?
We’ve been played for absolute fools.
No, in nearly every case, you never want a hard link. You want one file, and symlinks to it. (Technically every file is a hard link to an inode, and subsequent ones are just additional links to the same inode.) In ext4, you can’t easily get a list of links to an inode, you have to scan the filesystem and look for duplicates. Other filesystems might make this easier.
You shouldn’t try to use a tree filesystem to approximate a tagged database. Use the appropriate tool for the job.
That’s not an unreasonable answer. But I find this thread a little frustrating. As I see it, it’s gone like this:
Why bring up hard links if people shouldn’t use them for the requested use case? I mean, I do think your original reply was interesting and relevant as a starting point to get to what I think OP has in mind. But that line of thinking does require getting into how to use hard links for a non-hierarchical workflow.
I feel like OP was trying to start a discussion about what might be, if things were different. I tried to reply in the same spirit. I feel like I’m asking, “What if things were different?”, and I’m being told “It doesn’t work that way.” Which doesn’t feel like an especially helpful response to me.