Frank, Jon

...
or possibly an OS that refuses to create a link to a non-existent target
...

Well, you may have pointed out the real problem above.

The way the restore went, filesystems with links may have been restored
first and pointing, at the time, to non exiting targets (btw: the os was

Thanks you for your help.
Jerome

To: <amanda-users AT amanda DOT org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2005 10:00 PM
Subject: Re: Symbolic links

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
JG Computing
4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
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