There is a bug in tar, version 1.23 (to be more precise: I tested tar from the Debian package tar_1.23-1_i386.deb).
If extracting files and the -k (--keep-old-files) option is given and we are about to extract a symbolic that already exists then tar hangs up. This is the situation: hstre...@hstreibel:/tmp$ ls -l foo* -rw-rw-r-- 1 hstreibe hstreibe 0 Jun 8 20:44 foo lrwxrwxrwx 1 hstreibe hstreibe 3 Jun 8 20:44 foo-link -> foo hstre...@hstreibel:/tmp$ tar cf foo.tar foo foo-link hstre...@hstreibel:/tmp$ tar xkvf foo.tar foo foo-link Nothing more. tar hangs indefinitively. Hans
