Re: [Bug-tar] Possible bug with GNU tar versions >= 1.22

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hi Richard,

> On upgrading from GNU tar 1.20, I see an
> unexpected change in listing/restoring behavior when the
> --strip-components=N option is used with --occurrence=1 option. I
> don't know if this is specific to directories in which the file names
> begin with the same string as the directory requested, but in the
> past, I would get the entire directory rather than just the first file
> in the directory when doing a restore.

Yes, this was a side effect of several bug fixes (namely, commits
9c194c99 and 28e91b48).  The problem is that it is not quite clear
how --occurrence should interact with --strip-components.  For example,
given this archive:

$ tar tf archive.tar
./
./b/
./b/file1
./b/file2
./b/file3

the command `tar --occurrence=1 --strip=2 -x -v -f ../a.tar ./b' will
produce a single file `./b/file1', because the `./b' prefix gets
stripped off the file name and the directory member itself is not
explicitly extracted (if it were, the entire directory contents would
be extracted along with it).  I agree that this behavior is
counter-intuitive.  Allow me some time to fix it.

Regards,
Sergey