User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7 Build Identifier: As described in the URL above, GNU tar version 1.16 introduced a bug that causes symlinks to be extracted as zero-length regular files under some circumstances. Obviously this isn't Gentoo's issue, but it might be nice to mask that version for all architectures. Note that this is probably related to bug number 157923; I've filed this separately because 157923 appears to describe additional issues that are specific to Amanda. Reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: I noticed the problem while trying to a transfer a large directory from an old machine onto the brand-new Gentoo box that I'm in the middle of configuring (my first Gentoo machine, and so far I really like the way Gentoo is designed, but I digress :-). The archive command in question, issued on the old machine, was cd directory_to_copy tar cf - * | (ssh newmachine /tmp/tar xpf - -C /parent_directory) It was when I noticed that some of my symlinks had been transferred as zero-length files that I did the Google search which led to the above link. I haven't tried to research this any further; I figure the workaround is just to use an older version of tar until this is fixed by the tar maintainers.
Reopen with emerge -pv tar and emerge --info