7zip force ignore NTFS junctions

Question

Windows 1803, 7z 18.05

Trying to archive and compress a folder structure with multiple NTFS junctions referencing parts of the said structure (i.e. no "outside" links) - any possibility to compress the structure without 7zip resolving the junctions, resulting in duplicates?

Preserving the junctions would be neat, archiving the junctions as empty folders would also be acceptable - but archive size has absolute priority.

Choosing tar or wim as format has options about NTFS symlinks, but doesn't seem to involve compression (only store is presented as compression level) - I'd have to compress afterwards, which seems an unnecessary intermediate step.

I could delete the junctions before archiving, but I'd rather not to, if possible.

Answer 1

I would suggest to go in two steps :

1. Generate a list of all the junctions in the folder
2. Create a 7Zip archive from the folder while excluding the files in the list.

For the first step, you may use the following command in a Command Prompt :

dir /AL /S /B your-folder > exclude.txt

Where :

• /A displays all files with a specific attribute, and L specifies reparse points (symlinks and directory junctions)
• /S makes the command recursive
• /B specifies the bare format of only file names.

When zipping the folder use the -x (Exclude filenames) switch :

7z a archive.7z folder\ -xr@exclude.txt