hi all,

I am trying to ftp and get some symbolic link file as it is instead of getting whatever it is pointing at. Is it do-able?

Thx in advance.

Hmm... I don't believe that's possible.

Why would you want to do that in the first place? You could just make one of your own symbolic links pointing to the same thing or whatever else you want it to point to.

Thx for your reply.

I am ftp'g a directory. There are "symbolic link" files in there that point to files under the same directory tree. If I can't just download the LINK only, I will ftp some files twice. They are big. Therefore, I am trying to see if there is any trick to avoid that from happening.

You could just transfer the file once, and make your own symbolic link on your own system to point to that file. It would save time and save bandwidth and lots of hard drive space if these files are really huge.

You might consider using tar (on the remote)
to first bundle all the files in the directory
you want to get. By default, tar ignores
symbolic links. You can use rsh (or somthing)
to execute tar on the remote. Now you can
ftp just the tar-ball and you have only
the files.

I believe that by default tar takes symbolic links and restores them when you untar it as well. That might get you what you wanted.

(I was thinking you were ftping from a box that you didn't have shell access to so tarring up the directory didn't come to mind)

Correct doeboy. The use of the word "ignore"
was wrong. What I should have said is that
by default tar will not "follow" symbolic links.
It does in fact store and recreate them
when unbundled.

Sorry for the confusion.