Re: [Help-tar] compress list of files, when root folder is a symlink

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hi,

> ln -s /tmp/test/subfolder/dummyfile /tmp/test/subfolder/dummyfile-symlink
> cd /tmp/test/
> find ./subfolder-symlink/ > files.txt

There are several problems with the archive created this way. First of
all, it does not contain the entry for the directory subfolder-symlink
points to (that's the reason of the first error during extraction).
Secondly, symbolic links refer to absolute path names. So, if you use
the -P option while extracting: 

  tar -Pzxvf corrupted-tar.tar.gz

then it will extract fine, provided that the target directory exist. But
that's probably not what you want.

The proper way to create the archive in this case would be to (1) add
the subfolder entry to files.txt, (2) to use the --no-recursion option
to avoid descending into it and (3) to transform absolute links to
relative ones. E.g.:

   basename $(readlink ./subfolder-symlink) > files.txt
   find ./subfolder-symlink/ >> files.txt
   tar --no-recursion --transform 's|/tmp/test/||' \
       -S -c -T files.txt -zf uncompress-folder/corrupted-tar.tar.gz

Regards,
Sergey