Home / server / Questions / 265675
Accepted
DucDigital
Asked: 2011-05-03 19:14:07 +0800 CST

How can I zip/compress a symlink?

  • 772

Is it possible and how can I zip a symlink from a linux shell?

linux compression symlink

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can store symlinks as symlinks (as opposed to a copy of the file/directory they point to) using the --symlinks parameter of the standard zip.

    Assuming foo is a directory containing symlinks:

    zip --symlinks -r foo.zip foo/

    Rar equivalent:

    rar a -ol foo.rar foo/

    tar stores them as is by default.

    tar czpvf foo.tgz foo/

    Note that the symlink occupies almost no disk space by itself (just an inode). It's just a kind of pointer in the filesystem, as you probably know.

    • 90

  2. On RHEL 5, we have

    $ zip -h
Copyright (C) 1990-2005 Info-ZIP
Type 'zip "-L"' for software license.
Zip 2.31 (March 8th 2005). Usage:
zip [-options] [-b path] [-t mmddyyyy] [-n suffixes] [zipfile list] [-xi list]
(snip)
  -y   store symbolic links as the link instead of the referenced file
    • 13