From: Michael Guterl <mguterl@...>
Date: 2008-10-25T04:30:56+09:00
Subject: Re: How to tell if two paths point to the same file?

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 3:15 PM, Nobuyoshi Nakada <nobu@ruby-lang.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At Sat, 25 Oct 2008 03:21:21 +0900,
> Kenneth McDonald wrote in [ruby-talk:318516]:
>>  From the documentation, that seems to compare to different files to
>> see if they have the same content. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
>
> It tells whether two files are an identical file, in other
> words, same hardlinks.  The doc is too terse?
>
macbook:~ michaelguterl$ ri File::identical

------------------------------------------------------- File::identical?
     File.identical?(file_1, file_2)   =>  true or false
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Returns +true+ if the named files are identical.

         open("a", "w") {}
         p File.identical?("a", "a")      #=> true
         p File.identical?("a", "./a")    #=> true
         File.link("a", "b")
         p File.identical?("a", "b")      #=> true
         File.symlink("a", "c")
         p File.identical?("a", "c")      #=> true
         open("d", "w") {}
         p File.identical?("a", "d")      #=> false

Seems pretty concise to me...