Bug 159443 – GNU tar-1.16 introduced a bug involved extraction of symlinks

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED NEEDINFO

[Description Steven Winikoff 2006-12-29 21:24:22 UTC]

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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.

[Comment 1 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) 2006-12-30 01:23:24 UTC]

Reopen with emerge -pv tar and emerge --info