Can I dump a symlink?

Hi,

one great feature of restic that I find very useful is the ability to peek inside a repository, just to look at a file like so:

restic -r myrepo dump latest /file/of/interest

This comes very handy e.g. on my phone where fusermount does not work and I cannot mount the repo.

However sometimes I want to look at a file that in fact is a symlink and when I try the above command all I get is an error - which is not very helpful at all as I sometimes cannot remember the target of the symlink…

So my question: Is there a way to “dump” a symlink either by dumping the symlink target straightaway or at least by displaying the symlink target, so that you can use that to dump the information you are interested in?

Many thanks!

Not as it is now. Restic only stores the symlink as it is, a symlink or “pointer to a file”. As such, it has no content to dump. Restic does not have the feature of instead showing you the content of the file the symlink is pointing to. You could script it, if you wanted to.