I've come across what I *think* is a bug in the way GNU tar restores symbolically linked files. The problem appears to relate to restoring symlinks that have absolute paths when in a chrooted environment. Specifically, I have had this problem when rebuilding my filesystem after booting from a rescue disc and mounting the real filesystems under /mnt. After restoring from a tarball, symlinks that had absolute paths become empty files with null file permissions.
As an example, the proper listing for /bin/vi from ls -al is: lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Feb 4 20:43 /bin/vi -> /etc/alternatives/vi* If I restore from my backup with filesystems mounted as normal, this is restored correctly. However, if I restore in the chrooted rescue environment, the listing becomes: ---------- 1 root root 20 Feb 4 20:43 /bin/vi This occurs every time and does not seem to be related to the filesystem type, as I have replicated it with ext2 and ReiserFS types. Not something that 's a problem in normal day-to-day use, but just what you don't need when you're trying to restore a broken system :-) System details: tar version 1.13.25 GNU/Linux Mandrake 9.0 (although I'm pretty sure I've had the problem on earlier versions) using the rescue image provided on the CD. Filesystem: ext2 or ReiserFS Commands used: Building the archive: tar --bzip2 -cX /tmp/backup-excludes --atime-preserve -p -f \ /tmp/full-backup.tar.bz2 /* Restoring: tar --bzip2 -xvf /tmp/full-backup.tar.bz2 It might be that I'm doing something wrong, although I haven't managed to work out what it might be. Apologies for bothering you if it *is* user error... If I can provide any further information, please ask. Thanks for a useful bit of software - I'd be lost without it :-) -- Tony Green Ipswich, Suffolk, England Website http://www.beermad.org.uk/ *** No Micro$oft products were used in the generation of this communication *** *** A little something to keep the CIA spooks at Echelon busy *** Hijack Kabul _______________________________________________ Bug-fileutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-fileutils
