Unexpected behaviour when creating a tarball with -h: symlinks are replaced with hardlinks

[Mirko Vogt]

Hello,

I just experienced an unexpected GNU tar behaviour involving "-h".
>From my understanding -h de-references symlinks and includes the files
the symlinks point to instead of preserving the symlinks.
This understanding - if I'm not misreading the man page - pretty much
matches the description of this option.

However what I'm experiencing is - while -h indeed does not preserve the
symlinks - it replaces them with hard links instead of actually
de-referencing them and including the original file.

This in particular is an issue, if you want to create a tarball for a
filesystem which doesn't support any of such link types - e.g. FAT.

So when extracting the tarball (created with -h) on a FAT filesystem,
I'm experiencing errors like:

tar: dir/target: Cannot hard link to ‘dir/origin’: Operation not permitted

And nothing ends up where a symlink was present when creating the archive.

Tar:    tar (GNU tar) 1.30
OS :    Debian/Buster

Thanks in advance

  mirko