Re: [Bug-tar] Option -h of tar 1.26 is broken

[Juan PC]

Hi Sergey,

Thank you for your prompt reply.

El 16/11/11 00:13, Sergey Poznyakoff escribió:
> Juan PC<address@hidden>  ha escrit:
>
> > Option -h is not working in tar 1.26. When creating a tar archive, if
> > the file a symlink points to (let us call it "the original file")
> > appears after the symlink, then, the original file can not be
> > individually extracted from the tar file. Here you have the proof
> > (Linux distribution is Fedora 16):
>
> In this case tar does exactly what it is supposed to do: follows
> the symbolic link.  Since the link points to another file already added
> to the archive, it is then converted to hard link [1].
>
> If it's not what you want, use --hard-dereference together with
> -h:
>
>   tar -cvzhf test.tgz --hard-dereference /etc/rc0.d/K15httpd 
> /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd
>
> Regards,
> Sergey
>
> [1] 
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/commit/?id=37ddfb0b7eb41cc3f58bce686d389b1e965e9ccf

Therefore, I must assume that the behavior of the -h option has changed. 
This is the same test with tar 1.23 (and Fedora 14):

address@hidden ~]# tar cvzhf test.tgz /etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd 
/etc/rc0.d/K15httpd
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd
/etc/rc0.d/K15httpd
address@hidden ~]# tar xvzf test.tgz etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd
etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd
address@hidden ~]# tar cvzhf test.tgz /etc/rc0.d/K15httpd 
/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
/etc/rc0.d/K15httpd
/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd
address@hidden ~]# tar xvzf test.tgz etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd
etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd
address@hidden ~]# tar tvzf test.tgz
-rwxr-xr-x root/root      3316 2010-10-27 12:05 etc/rc0.d/K15httpd
-rwxr-xr-x root/root      3316 2010-10-27 12:05 etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd


Probably, the new behavior is the right one, but I was expected the old 
behavior, that is, that any symlink is removed and replaced with a copy 
of the file the symlink is pointing to (and this is also what I 
understand after reading the man page and info documentation of tar :(). 
Obviously, a tarball storing several copies of the same file will be 
bigger than a "regular" tarball which stores symlinks as such, but I 
also expect that.

Regards,

        Juan