as user, i mounted a cdrom and tared a directry from it.
after untarring the directory onto the hard drive, i saw
that all symbolic links were gone, replaced by zero sized
files with zero permissions.  the untarring also produces
"permission denied" error messages.

as root, the process works as expected.

is there some tar option i can invoke which will allow me
as user to tar/untar the files and maintain the symbolic
links?  i did peruse the man pages but didn't find
(recognize) the crucial option.

tia,
dan moylan