[BUG+PATCH] Tar sets time on the wrong file when unpacking

[Alex Landau]

Hi,

I noticed a small bug in tar, i.e. a behavior differing from my expectations and from GNU
tar.
When you unpack a tar file containing a symlink, tar runs utime on it to update its time.
This changes the time on the file the link is pointing to.
Unfortunately POSIX does not define (and Linux does not have) a syscall like lutime (ala
lchown) that can handle that.
GNU tar handles this by not changing the time on symlinks, which results in extracted
symlinks having always the time of extraction. rsync has the same problem, by the way.

The patch below does NOT set the time on an extracted symlink.

Alex

Index: archival/libunarchive/data_extract_all.c
===================================================================
--- archival/libunarchive/data_extract_all.c	(revision 18847)
+++ archival/libunarchive/data_extract_all.c	(working copy)
@@ -119,7 +119,7 @@
 		chmod(file_header->name, file_header->mode);
 	}
 
-	if (archive_handle->flags & ARCHIVE_PRESERVE_DATE) {
+	if (archive_handle->flags & ARCHIVE_PRESERVE_DATE && !S_ISLNK(file_header->mode)) {
 		struct utimbuf t;
 		t.actime = t.modtime = file_header->mtime;
 		utime(file_header->name, &t);



       
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