Just a brief history on what I have been doing, I trying to make some stand alone applications like abiword, gaim, pan etc.. for a mini version of slackware 10.0. I can find all the shared libraries by using the ldd command no problem but when it comes to copying them, that's where the problems start.

When using a script if I use cp or rsync I can only either copy the symlink and not the target file of the symlink, or it creates the symlink as the target file. But I eventually found a way around it with the cp command.

For an example if I want to copy /lib/ld-linux.so.2 which is a symlink to /lib/ld-2.3.2.so the command to use would be:

I found that the -R switch would copy the symlink only and then the -H switch would then copy only the target file. I tried it with both switches on the same line:

In a few combinations but found it would not work, not too sure how much a tip this is, but thought if any one was out there trying to do something similar it may help you out some what. I tried googling a few days but could not find any info to successfully copying symlinks and their targets.

Not sure if I understand your question but if you mean you want to copy a symbolic link file to another location then why not use the ' ln -s ' command to just create a new symbolic link in the new location from the orginal file. Then if you need to overwrite it use the -f ' ln -sf ' option for link command to force the overwrite.

Brian1

Sorry I didn't do a good job of explaining what I was doing. I'm making some standalone installation package for slackware 10.0 using makepkg, and to find all the required shared libraries use ldd.

It finds all the shared libraries required but some of these are actually symlinks. I created a script to copy all the libraries to a new location so I can have a clean directory for makepkg to build the new package.

But I found that cp or rsync seem to have a problem copying both the symlink and the target file. They seem to be able to only copy either the symlink itself or create the symlink with the contents of the target file.

Then after I built the package and installed it, when I ran /sbin/ldconfig to update all the shared libraries, it would get lots of errors about symlinks not being there.

Then using the commands above I was able to copy both the symlinks and their target files and build the standalone applications without any errors. Not really much of a tip, just something that had bugged me for a couple of days until I found a solution to it, and thought others who maybe having similar trouble with symlinks might benefit from some help.

Very confusing to me. Sorry can't be of more help.

Brian1

Did you try using tar ?

Tar is keeping plain files and links as they are.