Using hard links in Dolphin

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

My main use of Dolphin is to copy bunches of files to removable devices
such as pendrives. Often the files will come from different parts of the
filesystem and hence can't be selected all at once for drag-and-drop.
Furthermore, the copy itself is fairly slow (large files and USB
devices), but if I start several copies in parallel the process becomes
even slower. I haven't measured it but it definitely looks much slower
than copying the same set of files one after the other, which could well
be a bug but that's another matter.

One way to make all this a bit easier would be to create a Staging
directory and link the candidate files into it, then copy them all in
one swell foop and remove them when done, but there doesn't seem to be a
way to do this in Dolphin. Drag-and-drop offers a menu of options: Copy,
Move or Link, but the Link is a symbolic link. Thus the linking phase
works fine, but on copying the Staging directory Dolphin simply copies
the links and not the targets, which is useless (and doesn't even work
when the destination doesn't support symlimks).

Since all the candidate files are on the same filesystem, hard links
would solve the problem, but there doesn't appear to be a way of
creating them from Dolphin (and the online Help says *nothing* about the
pop-up menu on right-click, such as whether it's configurable).

Any thoughts?

poc