tar and /

[Jason Hellenthal]

From tar(1)

     o       Archive entries can exploit symbolic links to restore files to other directories.
             An archive can restore a symbolic link to another directory, then use that link to
             restore a file into that directory.  To guard against this, tar checks each
             extracted path for symlinks.  If the final path element is a symlink, it will be
             removed and replaced with the archive entry.  If -U is specified, any intermediate
             symlink will also be unconditionally removed.  If neither -U nor -P is specified,
             tar will refuse to extract the entry.

With that stated you might want to roll through your filesystem with symlinks(1) [sysutils/symlinks]. Use of this to shorten, remove dangling etc..

DESCRIPTION
       symlinks  is a useful utility for maintainers of FTP sites, CDROMs, and
       Linux software distributions.  It scans directories for symbolic  links
       and lists them on stdout, often revealing flaws in the filesystem tree.

       Each link is output with a classification of relative,  absolute,  dan-
       gling, messy, lengthy, or other_fs.

       relative  links  are those expressed as paths relative to the directory
       in which the links reside, usually independent of the  mount  point  of
       the filesystem.

       absolute links are those given as an absolute path from the root direc-
       tory as indicated by a leading slash (/).

       dangling links are those for which the target of the link does not cur-
       rently  exist.  This commonly occurs for absolute links when a filesys-
       tem is mounted at other than its customary mount point  (such  as  when
       the normal root filesystem is mounted at /mnt after booting from alter-
       native media).

       messy links are links which contain unnecessary slashes or dots in  the
       path.  These are cleaned up as well when -c is specified.

       lengthy links are links which use "../" more than necessary in the path
       (eg.  /bin/vi -> ../bin/vim) These are only detected when -s is  speci-
       fied, and are only cleaned up when -c is also specified.

       other_fs  are those links whose target currently resides on a different
       filesystem from where symlinks was run (most useful with -r ).

Hope this helps.

On Oct 7, 2014, at 1:44, Daniel Braniss <danny at cs.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> hi,Ian Lepore <ian at FreeBSD.org>
> for security reasons tar removes the leading /, which is fine.
> so I can chadir to /var/tmp, and do an extract there. The problem arises when there
> is a file that is linked to /…
> Is there some way to drop that leading ‘/‘ too?
> 
> cheers,
> 
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-- 
 Jason Hellenthal
 Mobile: +1 (616) 953-0176
 jhellenthal at DataIX.net
 JJH48-ARIN