How does tar deal with hardlinked files?

Question

I have a 2.5 TB of data that I want to put in a 2TB hard drive to mail somewhere. It's not hopeless, as a very large fraction of the data consists of duplicate files. I am considering using jdupes with the -H option, which will replace duplicate files with hardlinks to a single file.

Here's the problem: If I tar a directory containing multiple hard links to other files in the directory tree, will tar "reduplicate" them in the archive file?

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:37

7

Probably a duplicate from Dereferencing hard links

By default, a single copy of hardlinked data should be included in your archive.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:37

Community

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answered Nov 09 '16 at 00:11

SYN

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 09 '16 at 00:34

2

If you are using Fedora / RHEL, there is a hardlink package that will clean those things up for you as well. Then, as others have noted, tar will only store a single one by default.

answered Nov 09 '16 at 00:34

Aaron D. Marasco

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How does tar deal with hardlinked files?

2 Answers2