Hi, It seems that GNU tar 1.16 has a problem unpacking archives that have symlinks in read-only directories. Example:
$ tar --version tar (GNU tar) 1.16 ... $ mkdir archive $ ln -s /foo archive/symlink $ chmod -w archive $ tar cvf archive.tar archive/ archive/ archive/symlink $ mkdir unpack $ tar xvf archive.tar -C unpack archive/ archive/symlink tar: archive/symlink: Cannot unlink: Permission denied tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors $ ls -l unpack/archive/symlink ---------- 1 eelco users 0 2006-10-31 15:07 unpack/archive/symlink The problem seems to be that tar creates an empty file for the symlink (why?), and then tries to remove it, but can't because the directory is already read-only. Strangely, non-absolute symlinks (e.g. "ln -s foo archive/symlink") do work properly. Tar 1.15.1 did not have this problem. This is on SUSE 10.0 on x86, by the way. -- Eelco Dolstra | http://www.cs.uu.nl/~eelco