On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 03:56, WipeOut wrote: > How does tar handle hard links?? Is there a switch to use or does it > handle them automatically?? > > I looked through the man page and only saw a reference to symlinks but > not hard links.. I was surprised by the answers saying tar would "efficiently" handle hard links, so thought I would try it out. It was easy to confirm - I used a copy of the "ls" as the contents of my first tarfile, then the same executable and a hardlink to it in the second tar file. The 2 tarfiles are the same size, and a verbose table of contents on the second tarfile shows tar is aware of the link. Hope this is helpful to those interested. Cheers, Ben [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ cp /bin/ls . [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ ls -l total 80 -rwxr-xr-x 1 ben ben 76188 May 4 23:58 ls [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ tar cf t1.tar ls [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ ls -l total 164 -rwxr-xr-x 1 ben ben 76188 May 4 23:58 ls -rw-rw-r-- 1 ben ben 81920 May 4 23:58 t1.tar [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ ln ls ls2 [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ tar cf t2.tar ls ls2 [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ ls -l total 328 -rwxr-xr-x 2 ben ben 76188 May 4 23:58 ls -rwxr-xr-x 2 ben ben 76188 May 4 23:58 ls2 -rw-rw-r-- 1 ben ben 81920 May 4 23:58 t1.tar -rw-rw-r-- 1 ben ben 81920 May 4 23:58 t2.tar [ben@hillary hardlinktest]$ tar tvf t2.tar -rwxr-xr-x ben/ben 76188 2004-05-04 23:58:23 ls -rwxr-xr-x ben/ben 0 2004-05-04 23:58:23 ls2 link to ls
