Problem with tar version 1.29 (in Cygwin 3.6 64 bit) in extracting sym-link files

[vinay Hegde]

Hi Eliot Moss,
Thank you very much for the quick response & the information.It really helped.
I just set 'CYGWIN=winsymlinks:lnk' & I am now able to open sym-link
file. Both 'CYGWIN=winsymlinks:lnk' & 'CYGWIN=winsymlinks' are working
for me.
But it creates a shortcut(not the regular file). Hope it won't impact
my existing setup.

But both  'CYGWIN=winsymlinks:native' (which is default I believe) &
'CYGWIN=winsymlinks:nativestrict' are not working for me. Just to
understand, In what OS environment/File System 'native' will work?

Regards
Vinay Hegde

On Fri, Oct 2, 2020 at 9:13 PM Eliot Moss <moss@cs.umass.edu> wrote:
>
> On 10/2/2020 11:26 AM, vinay Hegde via Cygwin wrote:
> > Hi Cygwin Team,
> > In Cygwin 3.6, I am facing an issue while using tar.exe for extracting
> > .tar.z file.
> >
> > Issue summary:
> > When I use 'tar.exe' to extract the .tar.z file, it extracts all files
> > including symlinks. But symlink file size will be 0KB & it throws
> > error 'The file cannot be accessed by the system', if I try to open in
> > any Windows editor like notepad or notepad++
> >
> > Below are the details:
> > -   OS: Windows 2019
> > -   Cygwin version installed: 3.6 (tar version: 1.29)
> > -   Command used to extract the tar file is: tar -zxvf jre64.tar.Z
> > -   'ls -l' on the extracted directory shows:
> > lrwxrwxrwx  1 etbuild Domain Users      8 Jul 10  2017 ControlPanel -> jcontrol
> > -rwxr-xr-x+ 1 etbuild Domain Users   7734 Mar 15  2017 java
> > -rwxr-xr-x+ 1 etbuild Domain Users 128791 Mar 15  2017 javaws
> > -rwxr-xr-x+ 1 etbuild Domain Users   6264 Mar 15  2017 jcontrol
> >
> > -     As you can see 'ControlPanel' is a symlink file with 0KB
> > (8Bytes) size. This file, I cannot open in any Windows editor. It
> > throws error like ''The file cannot be accessed by the system'
> >
> > -    However, I can open this file in vi editor or I can 'cat' this.
> >
> > -    Earlier, I was using Cygwin version 1.7 (tar version: 1.27) & in
> > that, this issue was not there. Symlink file size was 1KB & I could
> > open it with any Windows editor.
> >
> > Please suggest what needs to be done to fix this issue.
>
> Hi, Vinay - Cygwin can use, and create, a variety of forms of links.  Some of these are understood
> by Windows tools, some not.  I suggest you read in the Cygwin documentation about symlinks and
> decide what kind are best for you.  Then you'll need to set that up, delete the existing link, and
> re-create it.  I personally run with CYGWIN=winsymlinks:native, but as we say in Internet land, YMMV.
>
> Regards - Eliot Moss