"bug|gnu...@nanl.de" <bug|gnu...@nanl.de> wrote: > However what I'm experiencing is - while -h indeed does not preserve the > symlinks - it replaces them with hard links instead of actually > de-referencing them and including the original file. > > This in particular is an issue, if you want to create a tarball for a > filesystem which doesn't support any of such link types - e.g. FAT. > > So when extracting the tarball (created with -h) on a FAT filesystem, > I'm experiencing errors like: > > tar: dir/target: Cannot hard link to ?dir/origin?: Operation not permitted > > And nothing ends up where a symlink was present when creating the archive.
Given that this is a common problem on non-POSIX platforms, 20 years ago star introduced support to unpack archives on non-POSIX platforms by using the options: -copylinks -copyhardlinks -copysymlinks -copydlinks See star man page http://schilytools.sourceforge.net/man/man1/star.1.html the related parts are currently on page 17. There is also the option -hardlinks see page 33, that tells star to unpack symlinks as hardlinks, which works on platforms like BeOS or Haiku. And finally, there is -link-data see page 35, which is allowed for the POSIX.1-1988 TAR archive format and later versions. -link-data tells star to archive the data again for hardlinkes files. Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sf.net/projects/schilytools/files/'
