[Bug-tar] failure setting directory modtime/permissions

[Paul Jarc]

I have a tarball containing:
foo/
foo/bar/
foo/bar/...

I do not have write permission to the existing foo/ directory in the
filesystem, but I have write access to foo/bar/, so all the files are
unpacked successfully.  GNU tar 1.14 fails because it can't modify
foo/:
$ tar xpf foo-bar.tar
tar: foo: Cannot utime: Operation not permitted
tar: foo: Cannot change mode to rwxr-xr-t: Operation not permitted
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Earlier versions of GNU tar, such as 1.13.25, did not fail in this
case.  Solaris tar also does not fail.  Is there a portable way to
invoke tar to avoid this failure?  Or can this behavior be changed
back to match 1.13.25 for the next version?


paul