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

[Denis Vlasenko]

On Tuesday 19 June 2007 14:37, Alex Landau wrote:
> 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.

Applied, thanks!
--
vda