Dear tar-experts I observed lots of files that where included in incremental tar files without beeing modified. And it seems that the reason is a modfied hardlink count of these files.
Here's a testcase: mkdir x touch x/f1 touch x/f2 tar cgf x.toc x1.tar x ln -s x/f1 x.f1 ln x/f2 x.f2 tar cgf x.toc x2.tar x tar tvf x2.tar Neither x/f1 nor x/f2 is changed but two links are created from outside of the directory x onto x/f1 and x/f2. Softlinks from outsde of directory x onto x/f1 do not influence an incemental tar of directory x but hardlinks do. My guess is that tar does a stat()-call on x/f2 and notices that the st_nlink-value has increased. Is that behaviour on purpose? It's a big problem for us since we rsync certain directories with the link-dest-option and this will increase the hardlink count on every file within that directory making incremental tars of those directories useless. I searched through the source to change this. Any idea which routine must be changed? Kind regards Peter Koch
