On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 07:29 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:um ... i don't see how since there is no discernible difference between two hard links that represent the same file. what exactly are you trying to do? i get the feeling that this really isn't the question you want to be asking.
Hmmm ... perhaps not. This is why I'm asking: I have a nightly cron job that uses tar to back up my home directory to an external drive. This job normally runs without complaint. However, a few weeks ago my internal hard drive started to report problems, and so I swapped it out for a new one, and restored my old partitions from images (not from the backups because they don't include every single file, just the important ones).
Ever since doing that, the nightly cron job reports back:
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names tar: Removing leading `/' from hard link targets
neither of which it ever did before. So, I'd like to determine what exactly is different now: I'm concerned that restoring my partitions has not been 100% successful (although I have experienced no problems whatsoever). I *thought* that the hard links issue would be the easiest one to investigate and so chose it first. To the best of my knowledge I have never created a hard link in my home directory.
tar will generate warning messages like these when you tell it to use absolute filenames, e.g.
$ tar cf mybackup.tar /home/me
You can prevent this by telling it to use relative filenames instead, e.g.
$ cd /home; tar cf mybackup.tar me
It'll generate similar warnings if you try to extract files from a tarball that has absolute pathnames in it.
Paul.
