Re: Unexpected behaviour when creating a tarball with -h: symlinks are replaced with hardlinks

[Mirko Vogt]

On 8/14/20 4:29 PM, Mirko Vogt wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I just experienced an unexpected GNU tar behaviour involving "-h".
> From my understanding -h de-references symlinks and includes the files
> the symlinks point to instead of preserving the symlinks.
> This understanding - if I'm not misreading the man page - pretty much
> matches the description of this option.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Tar:  tar (GNU tar) 1.30
> OS :  Debian/Buster
> 
> Thanks in advance
> 
>   mirko
> 

Sorry for the double-post - I didn't get any reply to either of my
mails, but only now saw - looking into the web-archive once again* -
that both of my mails made it to the list.



*I checked the webinterface several times, but also 12 hours later my
mail didn't appear there. Just for explaining why I sent it out once again.

So this very mail is to be ignored. Sorry for the noise.