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Full Discussion: tar the symbolic link
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting tar the symbolic link Post 302198550 by nua7 on Friday 23rd of May 2008 07:11:23 AM
Old 05-23-2008
Normally, when tar archives a symbolic link, it writes a record to the archive naming the target of the link. In that way, the tar archive is a faithful record of the filesystem contents. `--dereference' (`-h') is used with `--create' (`-c'), and causes tar to archive the files symbolic links point to, instead of the links themselves. When this option is used, when tar encounters a symbolic link, it will archive the linked-to file, instead of simply recording the presence of a symbolic link.

The name under which the file is stored in the file system is not recorded in the archive. To record both the symbolic link name and the file name in the system, archive the file under both names. If all links were recorded automatically by tar, an extracted file might be linked to a file name that no longer exists in the file system.

If a linked-to file is encountered again by tar while creating the same archive, an entire second copy of it will be stored. (This might be considered a bug.)

So, for portable archives, do not archive symbolic links as such, and use `--dereference' (`-h'): many systems do not support symbolic links, and moreover, your distribution might be unusable if it contains unresolved symbolic links.
 

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symlink(4)						     Kernel Interfaces Manual							symlink(4)

NAME
symlink - symbolic link DESCRIPTION
A symbolic (or soft ) link is a file whose name indirectly refers (points) to a relative or absolute path name. During path name interpretation, a symbolic link to a relative path name is expanded to the path name being interpreted, and a symbolic link to an absolute path name is replaced with the path name being interpreted. Thus, given the path name If is a symbolic link to a relative path name such as the path name is interpreted as If is a symbolic link to an absolute path name such as the path name is interpreted as All symbolic links are interpreted in this manner, with one exception: when the symbolic link is the last component of a path name, it is passed as a parameter to one of the system calls: or (see readlink(2), rename(2), symlink(2), unlink(2), chown(2) and lstat(2)). With these calls, the symbolic link, itself, is accessed or affected. Unlike normal (hard) links, a symbolic link can refer to any arbitrary path name and can span different logical devices (volumes). The path name can be that of any type of file (including a directory or another symbolic link), and may be invalid if no such path exists in the system. (It is possible to make symbolic links point to themselves or other symbolic links in such a way that they form a closed loop. The system detects this situation by limiting the number of symbolic links it traverses while translating a path name.) The mode and ownership of a symbolic link is ignored by the system, which means that affects the actual file, but not the file containing the symbolic link (see chmod(1)). Symbolic links can be created using or (see ln(1) and symlink(2)). AUTHOR
was developed by HP and the University of California, Berkeley. SEE ALSO
cp(1), symlink(2), readlink(2), link(2), stat(2), mknod(1M). symlink(4)
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