How to create a copy-on-write clone of a file in Node.js

David Herron
Level Up Coding
6 min readJul 26, 2019

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It’s been refreshing to learn of an advance in Linux/Unix file system semantics over the last 35 years. In 1984 I first used symbolic links, on a Vax running 4.2BSD. That was a significant advance over the hard links that had existed for many years before. The other day I learned that both Mac OS X and Linux support a new kind of link, a reflink, that is a form of copy-on-write for certain file systems.

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Software Engineer and author (Node.js Web Development and more) passionate about Node.js, climate change, EV’s, and clean energy. https://davidherron.com