I recently switched from tar-1.23 to tar-1.26. I tried to extract an icon theme, such as Tango, that has a lot of image files and a lot of symbolic links.
All files seem to extract properly, but permissions on some of the files were never set properly. The error case was pretty easy for me to reproduce and I fine tuned the case down to a few small commands below: # mkdir directory # for i in a b c d ; do touch directory/$i ; done # ln -s a directory/1 # ln -s b directory/2 # ln -s c directory/3 # tar -c directory > directory.tar # rm -Rf directory # tar -xf directory.tar As soon as I extract the tarball I get the following messages: tar: directory/1: Cannot change mode to rwxrwx---: No such file or directory tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors All of the files appear to be extracted. The files a and d have proper permissions, but b and c do not. All symbolic links are correctly extracted and point to the proper files. If I symbolic links are omitted from the tarball, then there are no error messages displayed. -- Kevin Day
