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From: zwicky@erg.sri.com (Elizabeth Zwicky)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals
Subject: Re: How do you find the symbolic links to files.
Message-ID: <1990Dec6.001401.8966@erg.sri.com>
Date: 6 Dec 90 00:14:01 GMT
References: <25146@adm.brl.mil> <1990Dec5.052124.28435@erg.sri.com> <109886@convex.convex.com>
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In article <109886@convex.convex.com> tchrist@convex.COM (Tom
Christiansen) writes: 
>This [making holes in files if you can by using lseek, whether
>or not they were there to begin with] works on a disk for copying
>files, but won't do you much good on a tape, where some other scheme
>would have to worked out.  I've heard that GNU tar does the right
>thing here.

I've heard that it doesn't, reliably; or, rather, that modern versions
of gnutar appear to reliably write files to tape with holes in them,
avoiding the "How can it take 8 tapes to dump a 16 meg filesystem?"
problem, but have an unfortunate tendency to die attempting to restore
the files. But this is hearsay. J, you want to provide some
honest-to-God facts here?

I have also heard speculations about the existence of programs that do
cuddle up to the raw disk and know where the holes in their files are,
and get upset if you move them around. Certainly this is theoretically
possible, although behaviour to be forcefully deprecated. Does anybody
know of programs that actually do this?

	Elizabeth Zwicky