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.