[Bug-tar] tar 1.16: cannot unpack symlinks in read-only directories

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

It seems that GNU tar 1.16 has a problem unpacking archives that have symlinks
in read-only directories.  Example:

$ tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.16
...

$ mkdir archive

$ ln -s /foo archive/symlink

$ chmod -w archive

$ tar cvf archive.tar archive/
archive/
archive/symlink

$ mkdir unpack

$ tar xvf archive.tar -C unpack
archive/
archive/symlink
tar: archive/symlink: Cannot unlink: Permission denied
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

$ ls -l unpack/archive/symlink
----------  1 eelco users 0 2006-10-31 15:07 unpack/archive/symlink

The problem seems to be that tar creates an empty file for the symlink (why?),
and then tries to remove it, but can't because the directory is already 
read-only.

Strangely, non-absolute symlinks (e.g. "ln -s foo archive/symlink") do work
properly.

Tar 1.15.1 did not have this problem.

This is on SUSE 10.0 on x86, by the way.

-- 
Eelco Dolstra | http://www.cs.uu.nl/~eelco