ADSM-L

Re: (U)Symbolic links in archives?

1998-09-04 15:15:12
Subject: Re: (U)Symbolic links in archives?
From: Brian D Chase <bdc AT WORLD.STD DOT COM>
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1998 12:15:12 -0700
On 4 Sep 1998, Dennis A. Haas wrote:

>  We recently had this question come up.  The answer can be found in the
>  "Using the UNIX Bacakup-Archive Clients", Version 3 manual, page 20;
>
>  "....In some operations, such as backup, only the path information that
>  the symbolic link contains is backed up.  In other operations, such as
>  archive, the file to which the symbolic link points to is archived, but
>  under the name of the symbolic link."
>
>  So, It looks like archive ALWAYS follows the symbolic link, regardless
>  of what value the FOLLOWSYMBOLIC parameter has.

Yeah... but what if I don't want it to always follow the links?  What if
I commonly have situations where symbolic links point back closer to the
root of their containing directory structure?

Say you have the following directory: /home/foo/broken
Which contain the following link:     /home/foo/broken/link -> /home/foo

So now you've got this loop which the ADSM archive operation cycles
through over and over and over until the filenames it constructs are so
long that they violate some length limit.  This type of situation occurs
quite frequently under IRIX in the .desktop directories of user home dirs
because of SGI's peculiar organization of the contents of those directories.
You ever eat up a 150GBs of scratch media on an archive of 2GB of data
because of a silly little looping link?  Mmmmm... I have.

I would like to see support for a third value to be added to
followsymbolic option:  -followsymbolic=no-and-I-really-mean-it

-brian.
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