ZVM-DEDUPE(1)

💅 ZVM-DEDUPE(1) — the zvm dedupe glow-up

okay bestie, so this is a User Commands page from the ZVM manual, and it's all about zvm-dedupe — the little icon that hard-links identical files across your installed Zig versions so your disk doesn't get bullied. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

zvm-dedupe — hard-link identical files across installed Zig versions, periodt.

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

zvm dedupe [version...]
zvm dedupe --auto on|off

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So here's the vibe: it hashes every regular file in the installed versions you give it (and legit all of them when you give it none) with SHA-256, then replaces the duplicates with hard links pointing into the content-addressed store at ~/.zvm/store/. 💖

The way that patch releases of the same Zig series literally share almost every file except the compiler binary? Yeah — so this roughly halves the space two of them take. Releases further apart share less, ngl. Just how it is. ✨

Files only get merged when their content, permission bits and (on Unix-like systems) owner all match — because hard links share one inode, bestie, it's giving "one soul, many bodies." Symbolic links, empty files and setuid/setgid/sticky files are left alone. 🙈 Not touching those.

Each file is replaced by linking the store copy to a temporary name in the same directory and renaming that over the original — so an interrupted run never leaves a file missing. 😭👑 Run it again and it finishes the job; otherwise it changes nothing. Files that can't be hard-linked (another filesystem, or one without hard-link support) are left untouched and reported; they don't fail the run. Slay.

⚠️ A deduped file is shared: editing it in place changes it in every version that links to it. A later run detects store entries that no longer match their hash and stops sharing them, but it cannot undo the edit — reinstall with zvm install --force instead. No cap, be careful. 💀

Store files that no installed version links to any more get removed by zvm-clean(1) and after zvm-uninstall(1). 🧚

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🔥 OPTIONS 🔥

• --auto on|off — sets whether zvm-install(1) dedupes each newly installed version automatically, then bails out. Stored as autoDedupe in ~/.zvm/settings.json. Off by default. 💅

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⭐ EXAMPLES ⭐

zvm dedupe
zvm dedupe 0.15.1 0.15.2
zvm dedupe --auto on

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

zvm(1), zvm-clean(1), zvm-install(1), zvm-uninstall(1)

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🫶 okay that's the whole page! This one's ZVM v0.9.4, dated October 2026 — go forth and dedupe, main character. 🎀💜