Symbolic links and 7zip

Question

I'm trying to compress a folder into a .7z archive. This folder contains symbolic links to some other stuff outside the folder (both directories and files).

Apparently 7zip just archives the link it's self which is not what I intended. Is there a way to tell 7zip that I want it to archive the stuff that it links too, not the link its self (so if there is a symlink name "foo" which points to "C:\stuff\foo" I want it to include the "C:\stuff\foo" stuff in the archive in place of foo, not a "0 byte" symlink...

Failing that is there any reasonable around it, apart from adding the files and folders in question? Including the stuff through the symlink there's like 10 000 files, the large proportion of which are via symlinks so adding them all individually would take hours... I'm thinking mayby a program that creates a staging folder with the real files in it then passes that to 7zip, or just an archiver that does handle them better?

I'm running Windows Vista. All the links are symbolic links (eg as created with "mklink link target" and "mklink /D link target").

EDIT:

dir command output for a smaller test directory:

C:\...>dir
 Volume in drive C is OS
 Volume Serial Number is 0A3D-CD6E

 Directory of C:\...

09/04/2010  18:12    <DIR>          .
09/04/2010  18:12    <DIR>          ..
09/04/2010  18:10               975 real file.txt
09/04/2010  18:11    <SYMLINK>      test file.txt [..\test file.txt]
               2 File(s)            975 bytes
               4 Dir(s)   5,214,355,456 bytes free

Creating a 7z archive of that with 7zip results in "real file.txt" being included, but "test file.txt" is added as a 0 byte file, although the file linked to does exist and is 50KB.

Answer 1

Apparently 7zip just archives the link it's self which is not what I intended. Is there a way to tell 7zip that I want it to archive the stuff that it links too, not the link its self

No, apparently not (unfortunately). There is actually a bug report on 7zip requesting this: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2846755&group_id=14481&atid=114481 but it was opened in August 2009 and not touched since :-/.

Failing that is there any reasonable around it, apart from adding the files and folders in question? Including the stuff through the symlink there's like 10 000 files, the large proportion of which are via symlinks so adding them all individually would take hours...

Well, if you have enough space (and time), you can make copy of the folder, replacing the symlinks with their targets. You can e.g. use Robocopy and its switch /sl:

/sl Copies the symbolic link instead of the target

Answer 2

If you are using Vista and above, remove the symlinks and replace them with mklinks

mklink /D Directory FullPathToRealDirectory

Note that mklink is pretty powerful and can include links to network shares and the like.

Since there seems to be some confusion on this, allow me to clarify. I'm assuming the OP is actually talking about Junctions as illustrated here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point. Mklink does not make junctions. It makes TRUE symbolic links and I tried it myself and 7zip respects them perfectly. Also, you need to be administrator to create mklink symbolic links.

 Directory of C:\temp\t

04/08/2010  04:50 PM    <DIR>          .
04/08/2010  04:50 PM    <DIR>          ..
04/08/2010  04:31 PM    <SYMLINKD>     GB [c:\users\testuser]    <-- created by mklink
04/08/2010  04:50 PM    <JUNCTION>     GB2 [\??\c:\users\testuser] <-- created by junction
04/08/2010  04:29 PM                 8 test.txt

7zip will archive GB, but it will NOT archive GB2. EDIT: Actually further testing shows that 7zip WILL archive both directories using version 4.65. So I have no clue what the problem is.