Ignore broken symlinks when compressing

[sigmaSd]

No description provided.

[figsoda]

as an alternative we can add a flag to preserve symlinks

[marcospb19]

as an alternative we can add a flag to preserve symlinks

Tar seems to support symlinks, but zip doesn't, so this flag would only work for tar?

[figsoda]

man zip gave me this

--symlinks
       For  UNIX  and VMS (V8.3 and later), store symbolic links as such in the zip archive, instead of compressing and storing the file referred to by the link.
       This can avoid multiple copies of files being included in the archive as zip recurses the directory trees and accesses files directly and by links.

[sigmaSd]

That doesn't mention broken symlinks explicitly and in practice if you try ziping a directory containing a broken symlink using zip it wont be in the zip archive

[marcospb19]

I think I should then create an issue to add a --symlink flag that does the same, @sigmaSd do you also agree?

[sigmaSd]

I guess its a simple flag and can be added easily

But I think it should be named -something like --dont--ignore--broken--symlinks

My hunch is this is an advanced feature and the flag should be explicit like the above to show it

Or another idea is to wait until somone open an issue about missing broken symlinks and explain his usecase, then it becomes obvious why we want this

[marcospb19]

--dont--ignore--broken--symlinks is different from the --symlink I was thinking about.

The former is about throwing errors when symlinks are broken, and the latter is about not following symlinks when creating archives, adding the symlinks instead of the files they point to.

I think that the latter would be a more interesting and useful flag, could be named as --store-symlinks.

[sigmaSd]

So I did some testing and there is actually some weird edge cases in how zip does this, but overall:

• zip follows symlinks by default (-y flag to not follow)
• tar doesn't follow symlinks by default(-h ? to follow)

Since ouch already is similar to zip in this area, I guess adding --store-symlinks is a good idea

[marcospb19]

Thanks for your research!
(Edit: both of you, actually ;) )