Bart van Heukelom asked:
I use the following pseudo-script to create a TAR of my installed software
mkdir tmp
ln -s /path/to/app1/bin tmp/app1
ln -s /and/path/going/to/the-app-2 tmp/app2
tar -c --dereference -f apps.tar tmp
I need the --dereference option here to follow the links I just made in tmp. The reason I make the links in the first place is to store the directories with a different name in the archive than they have on the filesystem.
Until now it has worked fine. However, I now have the situation that /path/to/app1 also contains links, and those I don’t want to follow.
Is this possible with some changes to the tar command? Or do I need to completely switch around the way I build the archive?
My answer:
Do you really need the directory structure in the tarball to be different than it is on disk?
If not, then you can just tar them up as-is:
tar -cf file.tar /path/1 /path/2
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