nlink

[frank]

Hello Sergei,

do the following: let nlink show up in MC, then set a (soft) symlink 
to any regular file: its nlink is incremented by 1. Thus nlink counts 
all links soft and hard, that's for sure.

Second little experiment: go with MC through some heavily populated 
directories. You will see that all regular files have a positive 
nlink, most have just one. It seems very plausible that is the hard 
link created when a file is created. That means a regular file with 
just one hard link has only its own entry in the file system, no 
additional hard links.

For directories, the situation is different. Browsing around with MC 
you will see that many directories have a nlink value of 2. However, 
when you create a subdir in them, nlink is incremented by 1. So the 
rule of thumb would be: a directory (except probably / which is not 
shown by MC) has a minimum nlink of 2 plus the number of its own first 
level subdirs. Of course, its nlink goes up if you set your own soft 
or hard links.

In my opinion, those minimum links for regular files and directories 
should actually not be counted by MC. MC should deduct them from the 
count reported by stat.

Regards

frank