tar: Link name too long for ustar

blixel_at_gmail.com
Date: 06/15/05 

Date: 15 Jun 2005 06:56:24 -0700

I'm kind of new to OpenBSD so please forgive my relative ignorance.

I installed OpenBSD 3.7 last night to replace my FreeBSD 4.9 box. The
install was easy and I was able to get Postfix and courier-imap
installed and configured in no time.

I untared my old Maildir.tar.gz to my $HOME directory and was able to
access my e-mail via IMAP with no problem.

The problem I'm running into now is that I'm trying to rebuild my cron
jobs on this machine to backup my users' $HOME/Maildir directories,
starting with my own.

It's a simple script:

#!/bin/sh

cd /home/david ;

if [ -f backups/mailbackup.tar.gz ] ; then
        mv -f backups/mailbackup.tar.gz backups/mailbackup-2.tar.gz ;
fi ;

if [ ! `tar czf backups/mailbackup.tar.gz Maildir` ] ; then
        echo "Backup failed" ;
fi ;

The problem I'm running into is this:

tar: Link name too long for ustar Maildir/.E-Mail Archives.2004.11
November/cur/1100305690.93026_56777845505.soekris.localdomain.com:2,RS

Apparently with OpenBSD's version of tar, I'm more limited with the
length of file and path names than I was before. That's ok - I'm all
about learning new ways of doing things. But so far my searching has
led me in circles so I'm posting this question.

How can I get around this file size limitation? If possible, I'd like
to continue using tar for the sake of familiarity. But I'm willing to
use something like pax to get it working because I'm very uncomfortable
not having my backups running.

I tried using pax like this:

$ cd /home/david
$ pax -wzf backups/mailbackup.pax Maildir

But I basically got the same error:

pax: Link name too long for ustar Maildir/.E-Mail Archives.2004.11
November/cur/1100305690.93026_56777845505.soekris.localdomain.com:2,RS

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