Jon LaBadie <jon@j...> wrote

I wonder why this would be required though. should this not be an option?

You want to chance backing up cd's, floppy's, nfs mounts, samba mounts,
multiple copies of things do to symbolic links, nerver ending circular
links?

not silently be imposed.

Which I why I thought about an option (like stay-in-filesystem)

If necessary, mountpoints can also be excluded  and
finally, gnutar by default dumps symlinks and does not deref them.
another option could force a --dereference if desired.