How to create backup from symbolic links?

Question

I have a directory with symbolic links to other directories. I want to archive the symbolic links, not as links but as archives containing the files of directories they refer to, using tar command. How can I do this?

Solution 1

Use the -h tar option. From the man page:

-h, --dereference
    don't archive symlinks; archive the files they point to

Solution 2

If the links are all in the root directory you can have the shell dereference them and pass to tar as arguments. For example if you have /backup/source/a and /backup/source/b, both of which are symlinks pointing to the real directory, something like the following would work

tar -cf /path/to/backup.tar /backup/source/*/

Comments

[Mcol]

If I have /sym1 points to /backups and /sym2 points to /backups, then I run tar -hcf file.tar /sym1 /sym2 will I get /backups twice?

[Suuuehgi]

@FelipeAlvarez -L counts files once, -l multiple times. See here.