On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Michael Lawrence
<address@hidden> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 1:39 PM, Paul Eggert
<address@hidden> wrote:
On 01/06/11 10:06, Michael Lawrence wrote:
> The last example I provided has no hard links.
No, actually, it has hard link. In the typical case (which
is what you had), a regular file has one hard link to it.
Less commonly, regular files can have two or more (or zero!)
hard links.
I'm sorry, but where is the hard link here?
$ ls -l foo bar
lrwxrwxrwx 1 larman larman 3 Jan 4 15:06 bar -> foo
-rw-r--r-- 1 larman larman 0 Jan 4 15:06 foo
There are no hard links to foo anywhere. Shouldn't 'bar' be replaced by the regular file 'foo'?
Ok, I've read up on hard links and now understand what you mean. It's too bad there isn't an option to preserve the old behavior, which was practically useful even if inconsistent.
> Are you saying that tar now behaves the same,
> regardless of whether there is a hard link to foo?
More accurately, I'm saying that tar now behaves the same,
regardless of the number of hard links to foo.
> So dereferencing a symlink will always produce a hard link in the archive?
No, dereferencing a symlink will always produce whatever would have
been produced had the symlink been replaced by whatever it points to.
Typically this will not be a hard link in the archive.