Find hard links?

[Paul Howarth]

D. D. Brierton wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-02-02 at 07:29 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>>um ... i don't see how since there is no discernible difference
>>between two hard links that represent the same file.  what exactly are
>>you trying to do?  i get the feeling that this really isn't the
>>question you want to be asking.
> 
> Hmmm ... perhaps not. This is why I'm asking: I have a nightly cron job
> that uses tar to back up my home directory to an external drive. This
> job normally runs without complaint. However, a few weeks ago my
> internal hard drive started to report problems, and so I swapped it out
> for a new one, and restored my old partitions from images (not from the
> backups because they don't include every single file, just the important
> ones).
> 
> Ever since doing that, the nightly cron job reports back:
> 
> tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
> tar: Removing leading `/' from hard link targets
> 
> neither of which it ever did before. So, I'd like to determine what
> exactly is different now: I'm concerned that restoring my partitions has
> not been 100% successful (although I have experienced no problems
> whatsoever). I *thought* that the hard links issue would be the easiest
> one to investigate and so chose it first. To the best of my knowledge I
> have never created a hard link in my home directory.

tar will generate warning messages like these when you tell it to use 
absolute filenames, e.g.

$ tar cf mybackup.tar /home/me

You can prevent this by telling it to use relative filenames instead, e.g.

$ cd /home; tar cf mybackup.tar me

It'll generate similar warnings if you try to extract files from a 
tarball that has absolute pathnames in it.

Paul.