untarring symlinks with ../ fails randomly

[Ken Brown]

On 6/30/2011 9:37 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Jun 30 14:43, Wolf Geldmacher wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> just joining after being hit by an obviously known issue:
>>
>> Running tar (in my case to extract openssl-0.9.8r.tar.gz) results in
>> symbolic links being randomly substituted by zero length mode 0 files as
>> described in http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2011-04/msg00299.html.
>>
>> For me this happens on both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008.
>>
>> The interesting (new?) tidbit:
>>
>> In sheer desparation I downgraded from cygwin1.dll/1.7.9.1 to
>> cygwin1.ddl/1.7.8.1 via setup.exe and the issue seems to be gone.
>>
>> As this is the only change I made: Is it possible that the problem is
>> not an issue with tar (as discussed on the mailing list) but in fact a
>> regression in cygwin1.dll?
>
> I never saw this happen.  Therefore, somebody actually seeing this
> problem has to debug it.  The least I need is an strace.

I'm not sure it needs further debugging.  The patch to tar given in

   http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-04/msg00385.html

solves the problem.  Eric said (in the next message) that he will apply 
this to the next release of tar.  In the meantime, it's easy to download 
the tar source, apply the patch, and rebuild.

Ken

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