Hard links in the inventory

For those that don't know, hard links are a feature present in Unix systems. It's something like a shortcut, only all names are equally valid. That is, there's one actual file on disk, but multiple names pointing to it. When the last link is removed, the item vanishes.

Why do I want this? I'd like to be able to categorize my stuff, and to add no-copy objects to multiple folders. Such a thing wouldn't constitute a copy, as the object would still be just one, only it would be still accessible from multiple locations.

It would also come handy for development. Some of the scripts I write can be reused later, and I'd like to have them in multiple places at once without having to keep them in sync by hand, which is error prone.

My idea of what this would look like:

Additional action in the inventory, "create hard link" that'd be used instead of "paste".
Items with more than one name referring to them would be shown with a different color and a link count.
When the item is down to just one name, it reverts to looking like all the others.

There's a bunch of similar proposals and votes for this, with names such as "aliases", "references", "shortcuts", and so on.

The implementation you describe is a good one, but the name should be something less intimidating than "hard link".

Well, I don't care much how they call it
Just happens to be exactly the same idea as hard links in Linux, so I thought it could be clearer that way.

Every item in your inventory is actually a Unixy "hard link", that is, an inventory name points at a UUID just as a unix path points to an i-node.

The odd difference is that inventory mixed object permissions into the directory structure so that you couldn't make another name for a UUID unless the object referenced by the UUID has "copy" allowed, in which case a copy is made even if you just wanted another name.

I can't think of why one would make it work this way; I can't tell if it was an accident or there was a reason.