On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 11:43:36PM -0500, Frank Smith wrote:
> --On Tuesday, September 27, 2005 21:21:15 -0700 Jerome Pioux <jerome.pioux AT 
> bull DOT com> wrote:
> 
> > Hum, I may just tried that but your non-recommendation is noted :)
> > 
> > I am also kind of surprised that noone had the same issue before?
> 
> I suspect Jon may have misread your question the way I initially did; that 
> you wanted tar
> to follow the links and backup the target instead of what it normally does 
> (recording the
> existence of the link).
> 


I wasn't sure what was the situation.  You are correct that I was replying
about how to foil amanda/gnutar into saving the target of the link rather
than the link itself.  Again though, I do not recommend that be done.  One
simple example, suppose a user makes a symbolic link to the "/" directory.
Do you really want to try to back up the entire system in this one DLE?


One item in the original post that I should have commented upon.
A symbolic link should not be zero (0) bytes in size.  It should
have a real piece of data stored on the disk, the name (pathname)
of the target.  So a symbolic link to "../foobar" should have a
size of 9.  If you are recovering symlinks with size 0 I would
check the bug info for your version 15.1 gnutar.

jl
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
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