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8.3.2 Symbolic Links
Normally, when tar archives a symbolic link, it writes a
block to the archive naming the target of the link. In that way, the
tar archive is a faithful record of the file system contents.
When ‘--dereference’ (‘-h’) is used with
‘--create’ (‘-c’), tar archives the files
symbolic links point to, instead of
the links themselves.
When creating portable archives, use ‘--dereference’ (‘-h’): some systems do not support symbolic links, and moreover, your distribution might be unusable if it contains unresolved symbolic links.
When reading from an archive, the ‘--dereference’ (‘-h’)
option causes tar to follow an already-existing symbolic
link when tar writes or reads a file named in the archive.
Ordinarily, tar does not follow such a link, though it may
remove the link before writing a new file. See section Options Controlling the Overwriting of Existing Files.
The ‘--dereference’ option is unsafe if an untrusted user can
modify directories while tar is running. See section Security.
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