How can I tar ball a directory hierarchy with soft links in linux

Question

Can you please tell me how can I tar ball/compress a directory hierarchy with soft links in linux?

Thank you.

Answer 1

GNU tar normally includes symlinks in the tarball it generates. If you want it to include the file the symlink points to instead then pass it -h/--dereference when creating the tarball.

Answer 2

When used with standard arguments tar xvf the soft link are saved in the tar archive as soft-links. Then there is 2 cases

• If your symlink is a full symlink, it might be broken when untarred.
• If your symlink is a relative symlink, under the folder you are tarring it will work fine when extracted.

If you want to tar the file and not the symlink, you can use the -h / --dereference argument.