hi ya dan i think the problem you have w/ hardlinks is more basic, how to create hard links or soft links... not a tar problem
# ln -s /home/foo/something.txt /home/bar - never use explicit directories vs # cd /home/bar ; ln -s ../foo/something.txt . - always use relative directories links becomes a problem when you are logging into many machines on the local LAN and need to get access to the files on other servers /home/<foo> is a common problem and will break if /home/foo is actually /export/home/user/<foo> on some machines and not others ( dpeends on disks and who was the admin that inherited the old/broken /home stuff /home should be portable across servers and networks /etc/foo.txt, /var/<something>/foo.txt areanother misconfigured hard or soft links relative links is the preferred methodology ( hard or soft ) and avoids the leading / and allows the portability of the files to be restored or shared in any level of hiercharcy cd /export/home ; tar zxvfp backup.tgz and the symlinks would still work c ya alvin > Gnu tar tries to handle the latter, according to the docs. > > But I've had trouble with unpacking hardlinks with Gnu tar. They seem > to be stored in the tar file including the leading /, so they can't > be unpacked with /usr mounted as /mnt/usr, say. >