[Bug-tar] empty extractions...

[Sam Halliday]

err... i downloaded

  ftp://mirddin.farlep.net/pub/alpha/tar-1.13.91.tar.gz

and i am having some trouble on FreeBSD-5.1... namely some
tarballs extract zero size files; a notable one being

  http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/audiofile/0.2/audiofile-0.2.3.tar.bz2

which i extract to

total 8.0K
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Aug 24  2001 AUTHORS
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Feb 27  2001 COPYING
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Feb 27  2001 COPYING.GPL
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 ChangeLog
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Feb 27  2001 INSTALL
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 Makefile.am
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 Makefile.in
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 NEWS
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 NOTES
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 README
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 TODO
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Feb 27  2001 acconfig.h
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 aclocal.m4
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Feb 27  2001 audiofile-config.in
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Feb 27  2001 audiofile.m4
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 audiofile.pc.in
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 audiofile.spec
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Feb 27  2001 audiofile.spec.in
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 config.guess
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Sep  9  2001 config.h.in
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 config.sub
-rwxr-xr-x    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 configure
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 configure.in
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Sep  9  2001 depcomp
drwxr-xr-x    2 samuel   samuel        512 Oct 26  2001 docs
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Sep  9  2001 install-sh
drwxr-xr-x    3 samuel   samuel       1.5K Oct 26  2001 libaudiofile
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 ltmain.sh
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Sep  9  2001 missing
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Sep  9  2001 mkinstalldirs
drwxr-xr-x    2 samuel   samuel        512 Oct 26  2001 sfcommands
-rw-r--r--    1 samuel   samuel          0 Oct 26  2001 stamp-h.in
drwxr-xr-x    2 samuel   samuel       1.0K Oct 26  2001 test

with this version of tar... it either seems to work 100% or not at all...

cheers,
Sam