Is there a way to completely remove an inode when the Link count is 2?

Currently my data is organised in a volume which has a cache directory (where all the files are first created or transferred). After that there are suitable directories on the volume which in their subdirs, contain files hardlinked to files in the cache. This is done so that the same inode (file) can be hardlinked multiple times in multiple directories.

Now when trying to clean up the volume, I recurively go through the dirs(not the cache) and based on certain criterion, unlink the files (which basically reduces the inode count of the cache entry by 1). Is there a way for me to delete the cache entry directly, when I am deleting the last hardlink (that is bringing down the count from 2 to 1). This way I would not have to manually parse through the whole cache directory to clear any inodes from it, which have a link count of just 1.

I have gone through unlink/remove functions, and could not find anything specific of use. Is there开发者_开发百科 some purging algorithm that internally takes care of this, then I can try to implement that.

Any help on this would be highly appreciated. In anticipation of a prompt reply.

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I saw this and a few other places which instruct you how to delete all hardlinks from shell (use find -samefile and call remove on each file). You could call it via system although that might be frowned on by some people).

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No, there isn't anything that does what you want out of the box.

It might be useful to do the deletion when unlinking the hardlink and noticing that the link count is 1, since at that point the inode should be in the page cache; this of course is dependent on knowing the name of the file in the cache directory.