Re: tar is creating corrupt archives when soft links are present

[Paul Eggert]

Thanks for reporting the problem. I'm not seeing the problem with GNU 
tar 1.34 as shipped with Ubuntu 22.10 x86-64. On this platform, the command:

  cd /
  tar -cf - bin/* | tar -tvf - >/tmp/tar.txt

outputs the attached file tar.txt, which looks OK, as it seems to match 
the output of the command 'cd /; ls -li bin/* >/tmp/ls-i.txt' which is 
attached. This is on an ext4 file system. (All the attachments are 
compressed with gzip.)

What would help to debug here is a smaller reproducer. Can you reproduce 
it with a smaller command like this?

   tar -cf - bin/awk bin/bash

In other words, make it as small as you can.

Also, even if you can't make it small, it'd be helpful to see the strace 
output so that we can see the information that tar is basing its 
decisions on. For example, I ran this command:

  strace -v --trace %%stat -o /tmp/tar-tr.txt tar -cf /dev/null bin/*

and got the attached file tar-tr.txt to see what the stat-like syscalls 
are yielding; can you do something similar?

Also, can you send the output of 'ls -il bin/*'? The inode numbers would 
be helpful for debugging, I expect.

tar.txt.gz
Description: application/gzip

ls-i.txt.gz
Description: application/gzip

tar-tr.txt.gz
Description: application/gzip