On Tuesday 22 February 2011 14:14:37 Hal Vaughan wrote: > I found this when using tar to unpack an OS image archive. I've been doing > this for a while on another CF card and had no problem. But now, when I > untar the archive, I keep getting "cannot create symlink" and "operation > not permitted." > > I've tried this with another CF card and it works fine. I've even tried it > in another mount point and it works. The only time it does NOT work is > with this particular CF card. I can unpack files to it and they are there > and verified, but I can't create symlinks on the card. > > Does anyone have any idea why I can create and save files on this CF card > and cannot make symlinks on it? Check the file system type. FAT and NTFS aren't real UNIX file systems, so they can't store certain types of files. NTFS supports hard links after a fashion, and MS Windows supports symlinks, sort of but not at the same "level" as a UNIX filesystem. There may also be other troublesome file systems, but all the old stand-bys (ext*, reiser*, xfs, jfs) and newcomers (btrfs, zfs) work fine. The problems almost always are in "compatibility" file systems. (Even the iso9660 file format had to be extended to support UNIX semantics, but those came before Linux, IIRC.) [I didn't mention many the kFreeBSD file systems, but that's just because I'm not familiar with running on kFreeBSD.] I seem to remember that there was a tool I contributed to that check a file system for proper UNIX semantics. It was originally destined to test fuse file systems to see if they were acceptable as a home directory (e.g. making /home/myuser a fuse-webdav mount point), but I believe it does at least check for symlinks being available. It is written in C, but it is fairly easy to read. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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