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RQST: support for symbolic links

2018-08-21
2018-08-23
  • Andrew Peter Marlow

    Hello everyone,

    I see from the man page that xz does not support symbolic links. Is this ever likely to change? I have been using 7z on windows and that doesn't support symbolic links either, and is not likely to do so in the near future (people have been asking for years). Is xz code based on 7z code? That might explain why lz doesn't support it yet.

    Regards,

    Andrew Marlow
    http://www.andrewpetermarlow.co.uk

     
  • Lasse Collin

    Lasse Collin - 2018-08-23

    xz doesn't follow symbolic links by default unless writing to standard output or --force is specified. Other kind of support for symbolic links isn't relevant in xz because xz is only a compressor; xz is not an archiver since xz doesn't store filenames, permissions, timestamps and so on in the .xz file. Often tar is used for the archiving step, so one gets a .tar.xz file. Compare to the .7z or .zip formats which are combined archiving + compression + encryption formats.

    Compression code in xz is based on LZMA SDK but the command line tool itself isn't.

     

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