Dealing with many many git repos in a /home directory

At $work we have a host where we have about 50-100 users each with their own private copies of the same repos. These are cloned froma remote via git/ssh and are not thus automatically hardlinking their object stores.

This is starting to take a lot of space.

I was thinking it should be possible to hardlink all of the objects in the different repos to a canonical single copy.

Would i be correct in thinking that if i have to repos with an equivalent .git/objects/../..... file in them that the files are necessarily identical and one can be replaced by a hardlink to the other?

If this is correct then is there some tool known to the list that already does this? I whipped this together:

find /home -regex .\*/.git/objects/.\* | perl -lne'if (m!(\.git/objects/../.+)!) { if (my $t= $seen{$1}) { link $t,$_ } else { $seen{$1}=$_ } }'

But a proper script with a sign off of some git dev would make me feel a lot safer :-)

cheers, Yves