On Fri, 16 Jan 2015, Paul Eggert wrote:
Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
Why is such behaviour desirable?
It's more logical, since it causes tar to behave as if the symlink were not
there, and the pointed-to file was there instead.
But when the tarball is extracted, two files with same inode are created,
which is kind of unexpected behaviour - at least for me - after creating
the tarball with --dereference, i.e. I've explicitly asked to follow
symlinks. And it beats the purpose some users have been using
--dereference - to avoid storing links which have more restrictions (e.g.
100 char limit).
Using -hard-dereference bloats the tar image, but if that's a price you're
willing to pay then you have a solution to the problem.
Indeed that's what I chose as workaround, compression deals well with
duplicated information so size bloating was minimal.
Thanks,
Dimitris
