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Possible Duplicate:
How can I tar ball a directory hierarchy with soft links in linux
I am using tar to copy files and directories from a Solaris machine to a Linux machine.
- Does Tar preserve the Symbolic Links, Hard links and those links which uses absolute paths?
I am copying the Directories one by one from the root, I am not copying the entire / to the new server as I already have few directories setup.
4 Answers
Take a look at the man page, at least for gnu tar:
-h, --dereference
follow symlinks; archive and dump the files
they point to
--hard-dereference
follow hard links; archive and dump the files
they refer to
generally speaking it depends on tar implementations and command line options.
GNU tar has options for that
I would like to recommend you use cpio instead of tar. cpio format is more portable across UNIX-es and cpio preserves hard links
It can, depending on the options you do/don't give it. Also, with regard to hard links, it will only preserve the hard links within the data set you are currently working with - e.g. if you have a hard link between a file in directory a/ linking to a file in b/, but you're only archiving/unpacking a/, then it won't preserve that link.
You should try Rsync in this case.
