explicit extraction of files behind (sym)links

[Aiyion.Prime]

Good morning everyone,

I thought I knew my way around tar for a few years now, but learned I'm 
wrong about that yesterday evening:

I'm archiving a directory-structure, that does contain large redundant 
files.

onepath/readme
onepath/binaryblob13
anotherpath/readme
anotherpath/binaryblob13

I cannot change the pathing, as this is to be fed to a packagemanager, 
that requires it.

What I thought I could do, to not have an archive twice the size of 
`binaryblob13`, was to use sym- or hardlinks and the `-h` flag for creation.

So archiving this:

onepath/
secondpath -> onepath/

using

tar --sort=name --owner=0 --group=0 --numeric-owner -chvf 
normal_sized.tar secondpath onepath ${mtime})

That would work like a charm if said packagemanger would extract the 
whole tarfile.

This is what it does though:

tar xf $tar_file secondpath/binaryblob13

And that works fine if I extract files from the directory first 
referenced in the creation command (in the case above secondpath)
but returns an error for the latter directory I archived, as it tries to 
create a hardlink on disk pointing to what would've been the former 
extracted file. As it does not exist I've got a problem.

I'd like to avoid extracting all binaryblob13 references beforehand only 
to have the link I extract point to something valid.

Is there a flag to tell tar "I dont care if you have to seacrh the 
archive twice, but extract the original file instead of creating an 
(invalid) hardlink"?


I realize thats unuseable for actual tape-records, but maybe someone has 
a hint for me here.

Thanks in advance and have a nice morning,
Aiyion