Hi, Just a heads-up... I just downloaded GNU tar 1.27 and noticed that the extraction bug for archives containing sparse files is still present. :(
The bug shows up when attempting to extract archives which were created by star with its "artype=xustar" option. Sergey Poznyakoff originally posted a patch for the bug in February 2011, see http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2011-02/msg00011.html I applied that patch to the tar 1.27 source and it does fix the bug. Without the patch, tar gets very confused and can create zero-length files with "garbage" names. Here's an example of the output of the unpatched tar when trying to extract a particular archive: $ tar -xf test_star.tar tar: Skipping to next header tar: Substituting `.' for empty member name tar: .: Cannot open: Is a directory tar: Skipping to next header tar: Skipping to next header tar: Archive contains '\0009\026B\002\002\001\001H\0`\001' where numeric off_t value expected tar: Substituting `.' for empty member name tar: .: Cannot open: Is a directory tar: Skipping to next header tar: Skipping to next header tar: Substituting `.' for empty member name tar: .: Cannot open: Is a directory tar: Skipping to next header tar: Skipping to next header tar: Skipping to next header tar: Substituting `.' for empty member name tar: .: Cannot open: Is a directory tar: Skipping to next header tar: Substituting `.' for empty member name tar: .: Cannot open: Is a directory tar: Skipping to next header tar: Substituting `.' for empty member name tar: .: Cannot open: Is a directory tar: Skipping to next header tar: Skipping to next header tar: Skipping to next header tar: Skipping to next header tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors -- Mark
