How do you find the symbolic links to files.

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

jonb at specialix.co.uk (Jon Brawn) writes:

>I would hope that tar would copy the contents of the file. That would be
>do much more useful than trying to do a restore, and discovering that what
>you thought you had backed up as /usr/data_base/main_data_file was in
>actual fact just a sixty four character pathname to an obscure corner of the
>file system, and that you had, in fact, lost everything in the last crash...
>...but I guess tar will probably just backup the symbolic path name anyway.

I don't think you can blame tar for sloppy administration practices. If you
don't back up all your file systems, you will have this type of problem
regardless of what software you use for your archives.

What about the case where you have the following symlinks:

	/nfs/user0/lyndon/bin/share/mailq --> /usr/local/smail/mailq
	/usr/local/smail/mailq --> /usr/local/bin/smail
	/usr/local/bin/smail --> /usr/lib/sendmail

where /nfs/user0, /usr, and /usr/local are seperate filesystems. How should tar
deal with this? 

-- 
    Lyndon Nerenberg  VE6BBM / Computing Services / Athabasca University
        {alberta,cbmvax,mips}!atha!lyndon || lyndon at cs.athabascau.ca
                    Packet: ve6bbm at ve6mc [.ab.can.na]
      The only thing open about OSF is their mouth.  --Chuck Musciano