Re: [Bug-tar] tar doc question: what is "hard-dereference"; how is it done?

[Linda A. Walsh]

I usually look in the manpage.  There's not even a link to the
URL, below, that you mention.  So how would people know to
look there, though I think the manpage is a better place for
information like that.  Thank you for the link -- I'd never
seen that feature or switch before.

Instead of going this route with hard-links, maybe tar
might pre-process the directory tree into its own memory,
or as a .dir-<some-dt-stamp> at the root of the tree just
for things like hardlinks; 

or)  store the inode of multi-linked files that
would act like a symbolic-identifier
within the tar-archive, requiring multi-linked files to
be extracted with any "partial-extract",

or) building on the previous... create full copies of
hard-linked files with the inode#-as-sym that can be
replaced w/hardlinks on extraction.  That way either copy
could be extracted separately, and only in the presence
of both would they be hardlinked.

I don't usually use the partial extract option which may
be why I've never noticed this behavior...

Thanks again for the ptr.





On 12/6/2013 4:44 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Linda A. Walsh wrote:
> > What is this switch suppose to do?
>
> To answer questions like these, I suggest looking
> at the tar documentation.  Here's a URL:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/hard-links.html