I don't think you'll find some flag that indicates whether they are reliable or not, but I had the impression that various pieces of GNU coreutils have conditional code to use them to tell when two files are in fact the same file; you might look to see under what conditions it trusts them.

Update: there is nothing helpful in the coreutils source, sorry.

In reply to Re: Is device+inode meaningful? by ysth
in thread Is device+inode meaningful? by ikegami

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