UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I create the tar file from / like so:

tar cEhf name.tar usr/us

And this creates the tar with the links intact. The problem is that this tar is going to be used for testing, so we want the links to point to the files in the tar. But when I extract the tar into /tmp, I get /tmp/usr/us/... as I expect, but the links are NOT /tmp/usr/us/... like I want but are /usr/us/...; the original location.

Is there a way to get the links to be relative the same way the rest of the files are?

System is Solaris 10 and I have been using tar xvf to extract. I'm hoping the problem is in the extraction since it will take several hours to rebuild a pristine system to redo the tar files if that's where the change needs to be made.

Oh, and finally, the links are important to what we are testing, so replacing the link with just a copy of what the link points to will not satisfy the conditions of the test.

Thanks.

Clearly you understand why you should not use absolute path while creating tar file. Same rule applies for links. If you use absolute path for link, it will remain so. Solution is to create links with relative path.
eg: cd /usr
ln -s us us1

Thanks for the reply. I tried to do this with mixed results. If the link was farther down the path, it woked, ie:

ln -s test/test/filea.txt filea.txt

This is restored no problem. But if I have a link like so:

ln -s ../test/filea.txt filea.txt

Then even though the parent dir and it's child 'test' are in the tar, the link is replaced with an actual copy of the file, so that an ls -al will show a file there now instead of a link. This does make sense to my why it would work this way, but I need it to not work that way.

Maybe tar is the wrong answer. I really just need to be able to archive up a bunch of files under /usr and then extract them under /tmp/test and have any links in there that used to point to /usr/... now point to /tmp/test/... Is this possible? The alternative will be to make a list of the symlinks using something like 'find . -type l' and then create a script to insert the symlinks after extraction. This is a less desirable option.

Thanks again

Edit: the less desirable option won. I made a script to go in and redo the absolute links so they use the new absolute path.