Shell Programming and Scripting

I have this tar file which has files of (.ksh, .ini &.sql) and their hard and soft links.

Later when the original files and their directories are deleted (or rather lost as in a system crash), I have this tar file as the only source to restore all of them.

In such a case when I do,

tar -xvf <tarfile name> should give me the original snapshot of files and directories relative to the current directory.

But what I get from extracting this tar is only the links of any files that existed in this directory. The rest of the directories and files within them are not restored.

Can someone please help me with where I'm going wrong?

TIA,
Sirisha

I don't want to panic you but are you sure that the tar file contains the lost files ? You could list the archive and check for file paths/names/sizes using
tar -tvf <tarfile name> | more

If the files are there and are reasonable sizes then check that you have permission to write the extracted files and that you are writing them in the right place (you will see the file paths in the tar archive listing above).

If you've had a system crash have you run diagnostics on discs (fsck) - sometimes disc errors can stop you writing to specific areas.
Do you get any (error) messages when trying to restore?

good luck!

Although the name tar refers to tape archive
I don't think that tar is the ideal tool for system backups.
Better chose a dump and restore command that is coming with your Unix'es
filesystems.
If you however wish to cling to filesystem independent commands
I would prefer find together with cpio over tar.
If you are using GNU tar you could give the derefernce switch -h a try
which instead of the symlink will include the referred to file in the dump.
But since you already have your filesystem corrupted you have to live with your tar archive
which only includes the symlinks, I am afraid.

thestevew and buffoonix,

Thanks a ton for ur comments! The archive does contains all the files and their links even if the original files and directories are deleted. And yes, the "-h" option did work.. it not only inclues the physical files referred to in the archive but also all their symlinks and hard links too.

buffoonix, many thanks for ur advice on using unix native file system commands for archiving.. i'm on Solaris 5.6 and can u please tell me which are such commands?

Again,cpio is an option i have! More comments are welcome..

Thanks both of you!

Solaris 5.6?
This should be the same as Solaris 6, shouldn't it?
Sorry, the SUN marketing folks always like to confuse people with their uninspired jumps in release versions (the same goes for Java I guess).
I am afraid, the oldest Solaris at my disposal is 8.
But anyway, up until OpenSolaris or Solaris 11 I think all Solaris releases sticked to the UFS filesystem.
Therefore there should be a "ufsdump" for creation of backup dumps,
and its counterpart "ufsrestore" for extraction and inspection.
Please, have a look at their manpages.
They even should contain some examples.
The advantage of these is that they are optimized for the UFS
and thus should also be capable of handling features special to that filesystem
(e.g. ACLs, largefiles, but I'm not sure, the manpage should tell).
They also allow you to devise incremental backups and thus safe storage.
Most of the dump restore counterparts also have an interactive mode
which is nice for moving around in a dump before deciding what to restore.
Usually every Unix filesystem should provide a dump and restore.
If for instance you had some VxFS (Veritas) filesystems mounted
then you could use vxdump and vxrestore.