one thing that has always bothered me about computing and games is that often you are stuck with mutable copies of the same files in different directories. some examples are like hl2dm and gmod and css eta .bsps you might have 5 different copies of the same .bsp file. or in fallout NV and fallout 3 you often have the same .nif and .dds files. this really racks up and takes up tremendous amount of space.

is there any program or something that can make it so have only one copy of any file and allow any game to read the file via a shortcut as if it was in it's proper directory? it seems though this would mean an update to the whole OS would have to be done? also i never seem to see anyone think of this before .