#1188 symlinks in tar archives are extracted to 0 byte files

[Guenter Knauf]

when a tar file contains symlinks then this results in 0 byte files; I think when the file system doesnt suppor symlinks then the symlinks should be resolved to the files they point to, thus when you have an archive like:
./folder_a/original_file
./folder_b/symlink_to_original_file

then a copy of original_file should be extracted to ./folder_b too instead of a 0 byte file.

[Igor Pavlov]

1) Use only latest 7-Zip 9.20.
2) Show example of such bad "TAR" archive with symlinks.

[No Name]

I believe this is still a problem. The current solution of 7zip (9.22b and 9.26a) is to create a file and place the destination of the linked file/directory in it. Since this is a tough one to tackle, it would be great if there was an option (especially on the command line 7z) that would force 7-zip to go into a mode that unix links are interpreted as copying the linked file at the location of the link.

i'll attach a sample .tar file that was compressed on linux, but extracting it on windows produces contents that are not usable.

[Roy Tam]

sample tar file attached.

tar tvf shows:

drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2013-06-29 11:01:56 a/
-rw-r--r-- root/root         5 2013-06-29 11:01:53 a/1.txt
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2013-06-29 11:02:11 b/
lrwxrwxrwx root/root         0 2013-06-29 11:02:11 b/2.txt -> ../a/1.txt

b/2.txt contents becomes "../a/1.txt", but suitable(I can't say "correct" here) action is copying a/1.txt to b/2.txt for extraction.

[Roy Tam]

and hard link sample tar is attached.

tar tvf shows:

drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2013-06-29 11:01:56 a/
-rw-r--r-- root/root         5 2013-06-29 11:01:53 a/1.txt
drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2013-06-29 11:06:17 b/
hrw-r--r-- root/root         0 2013-06-29 11:01:53 b/2.txt link to a/1.txt