Symbolic links

[pyotr777]

Can't find a way to store symlinks as symlinks in tar archive. Symlinks get stored as their target files.

[pyotr777]

Here is my way of storing symlinks. This function takes two arguments: list of files to put into the archive and the name of tar archive.

     /**
     * Zip files from file_list into archive zipFile 
     * @param zipFile output ZIP file location
     */
    public void tarIt(ArrayList file_list, File tar_file) throws IOException, FileNotFoundException,SecurityException {
        TarOutputStream tos=null;
        try{
            FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(tar_file);
            tos = new TarOutputStream( new BufferedOutputStream(fos));
            System.out.println("Creating tar " + tar_file + " with files:");
            for(File file : file_list) {
                System.out.print(file);
                TarEntry te= new TarEntry(file, generateTarEntry(file.getAbsolutePath()));
                te.setModTime(file.lastModified());
                Date modificationTime = te.getModTime();
                System.out.print("\t\t"+modificationTime);
                // copy file owner permissions
                // default permission: 644              
                TarHeader tar_header = te.getHeader();
                if (file.canExecute()) tar_header.mode = tar_header.mode | 0100; // add execute permission
                if (file.canWrite()) tar_header.mode = tar_header.mode | 0400; // add write permission
                else tar_header.mode = tar_header.mode & 0177577; // remove write permission
                System.out.println("\t\t "+ Integer.toOctalString(tar_header.mode - 0100000)+"\t"+tar_header.size);
                if (Files.isSymbolicLink(file.toPath())) {
                    tar_header.linkFlag=TarHeader.LF_SYMLINK;
                    String target_path = Files.readSymbolicLink(file.toPath()).toString();
                    tar_header.linkName=new StringBuffer(target_path);      
                    tar_header.size = 0;
                    tos.putNextEntry(new TarEntry(tar_header));                 
                } else {    
                    tos.putNextEntry(new TarEntry(tar_header));
                    BufferedInputStream origin = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream( file ));
                    int count;
                    byte data[] = new byte[2048];                 
                    while((count = origin.read(data)) != -1) {
                        tos.write(data, 0, count);
                    }
                    origin.close();
                }               
                tos.flush();                
            }
        } finally {   
            tos.close();
        }
    }

[kamranzafar]

Thankyou for your contribution.