The problem
I am using unRAID on my home server. I use Manual split level on user shares to keep files together, and not scattered all over the different drives. This means, that quite often I am manually moving folders around from one disk to another. I also use a lot of hardlinks for torrents. Actually, all my seeding torrents are hardlinks.
Here’s a simplified example of the folder structure. There is actually only 2 movie files, both having 2 hardlinks.
/mnt/disk1/media/movies/movie1/movie1.mkv
/mnt/disk1/media/movies/movie2/movie2.mkv
/mnt/disk1/media/torrents/movie1.mkv
/mnt/disk1/media/torrents/movie2.mkv
Now let’s say I want to move movie1 directory to disk2, and preserve all hardlinks, if there’s any.
from: /mnt/disk1/media/movies/movie1
to: /mnt/disk2/media/movies/movie1
Here’s what I do now… manually
I use a bash script to check if the directory has any files with hardlinks outside that directory, because:
Note that rsync can only detect hard links between files that are inside the transfer set. If rsync updates a file that has extra hard-link connections to files outside the transfer, that linkage will be broken.
The script uses find with -samefile to find all hardlinks for all the files, that have any.
For the above example, I would have found, that movie1.mkv has a hardlink inside torrents directory.
So, I manually move everything to the same temporary move folder.
/mnt/disk1/media/move/movies/movie1/movie1.mkv
/mnt/disk1/media/move/torrents/movie1.mkv
Then, I use rsync to move the files (preserving the hardlinks).
cd /mnt/disk1/
rsync -avPRXH --remove-source-files media/move /mnt/disk2/
Afterwards I delete the leftover empty directories.
find /mnt/disk1/media -type d -empty -delete
And finally I manually move the files from the move folder back to their original locations.
/mnt/disk2/media/movies/movie1/movie1.mkv
/mnt/disk1/media/movies/movie2/movie2.mkv
/mnt/disk2/media/torrents/movie1.mkv
/mnt/disk1/media/torrents/movie2.mkv
Can rsync and/or/with some other linux tool do this automatically?
As you can imagine, doing this manually is really tedious, especially when moving large directories, with lots of hardlinks.
I could write another script to automate this, but writing bash scripts is real pain (imho, the syntax is so bad). So, atm I am writing a small cli app with node.js to automate this process.
But because I am a total Linux and command line newb 
and I know that actually I do not know anything… I decided to ask maybe there is a good script/tool to do that already? I mean, this feels like a common enough problem, that probably got solved countless times ages ago…
Thanks in advance for any help.