From: Chris Ball
Date: 19:26 on 18 Sep 2003
Subject: GNU tar(1).
Please allow me to introduce you all to GNU tar.
GNU tar does wonderful new things, none of which have been done in a
mostly unchanging fashion for several decades. Since the code is in
such constant flux, sometimes it's inevitable that occasional bugs
slip through the net of the keen and watchful GNU developers.
Like, say, this one:
I create an archive of /usr under Solaris, with `tar cvf usr.tar /usr`.
I copy it to a Linux machine. I unpack it with `tar xvf usr.tar`.
But wait. We have errors. They look like this:
tar: usr/bin/uncompress: Cannot hard link to `/usr/bin/compress':
No such file or directory
tar: usr/bin/zcat: Cannot hard link to `/usr/bin/compress':
No such file or directory
tar: usr/bin/zipinfo: Cannot hard link to `/usr/bin/unzip':
No such file or directory
That doesn't seem right. Actually, the Solaris fetish for hard links
doesn't seem right -- but of more importance to me right now, neither
does the error; usr/bin/unzip *does* exist in the archive. Maybe an
strace -elink will help:
link("/usr/bin/compress", "usr/bin/uncompress") = -1 ENOENT (No such
file or directory)
link("/usr/bin/compress", "usr/bin/zcat") = -1 ENOENT (No such file
or directory)
link("/usr/bin/unzip", "usr/bin/zipinfo") = -1 ENOENT (No such file
or directory)
# ^ note leading slash
So, while GNU tar's happy to remove leading slashes from archive paths
while unpacking, it'd rather spew links straight through to the machine
the archive's being unpacked on than to the archive it's just made for
itself. CHRIS SMASH NOW. AXE FIRE PLASTIC. DEATH. BURN.
(In case you're thinking that this'll be fixed by now, well, it's in the
latest Debian stable tar (1.13.25). It's been reported to bug-gnu-utils
on many occasions, including this one from _2001_:
<http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2001-05/msg00217.html>;.)
- Chris.
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