Re: Copying one hard drive to another - links

[Alvin Oga <aoga@Mail.Linux-Consulting.com>]

hi ya dan

i think the problem you have w/ hardlinks is more basic,
how to create hard links or soft links... not a tar problem

# ln -s /home/foo/something.txt /home/bar
	- never use explicit directories
vs

# cd /home/bar ; ln -s ../foo/something.txt .
	- always use relative directories

links becomes a problem when you are logging into many machines
on the local LAN and need to get access to the files on other servers
	/home/<foo> is a common problem
	and will break if /home/foo is  actually /export/home/user/<foo>
	on some machines and not others ( dpeends on disks and who
	was the admin that inherited the old/broken /home stuff

	/home should be portable across servers and networks

	/etc/foo.txt, /var/<something>/foo.txt areanother misconfigured	
	hard or soft links

relative links is the preferred methodology ( hard or soft )
and avoids the leading / and allows the portability of
the files to be restored or shared in any level of hiercharcy
	cd /export/home ; tar zxvfp backup.tgz
	and the symlinks would still work

c ya
alvin


> Gnu tar tries to handle the latter, according to the docs.
> 
> But I've had trouble with unpacking hardlinks with Gnu tar.  They seem
> to be stored in the tar file including the leading /, so they can't
> be unpacked with /usr mounted as /mnt/usr, say.
>