DLL loading with hardlink

Question

I am trying to devise a method which helps to load DLL from a common location for various products. This helps the following directory structure to avoid file replication.

INNSTALLDIR/Product1/bin
INNSTALLDIR/Product2/bin
..
INNSTALLDIR/ProductN/bin>

Instead of replicating DLLs in each product's bin directory above, I can create a DLL repository/directory - 'DLLrepo' in INSTALLDIR and make all product exceutables load from it. I am thinking to do this by creating hardlink to each DLL in 'DLLrepo' in each product's bin directory. This will help to address platforms starting from WinXP. Using 'probing' method can address only Windows server 2008 and above.

I like to get your opinion if this approach looks like a reasonable solution.

When we create hardlink to a file, the explorer or DIR command doesn't account valid size of the folder involving link. It account the actual data size in the linked file in total size of the directory. This is a known issue in windows if I am not wrong. Is there any utility that I can use to verify the actual folder size? Is it possible to use 'chkdisk' on a directory path? Another thing which I like to know is to get the list of links created on file data.

Answer 1

When we create hardlink to a file, the explorer or DIR command doesn't account valid size of the folder involving link. It account the actual data size in the linked file in total size of the directory. This is a know issue in windows if I am not wrong. Is there any utility that I can use to verify the actual folder size?

I can provide an answer, of sorts, for this part of the question. When you create file hardlinks, there's not really any concept of which "file" is the original. Each of them points to the space on disk that the data is occupying and modifying the file via any of these references affects the data that's seen when accessing it via any other hardlink. As such it's less a known "issue" and more of a "this is how it works".

As such, there's no way to verify "actual folder size" unless you're looking at the size of the highest common parent folder of the folders that contain the links. At that point you can start single-counting each hard-link to get an accurate idea of space used on disk.