Date: Wed, 7 May 2008 15:26:23 +0300 (EEST)
From: tommi DOT sairo AT elisanet DOT fi
Reply-To: tommi DOT sairo AT iki DOT fi
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Message-ID: <9247911.266331210163183588.JavaMail.tommi.sairo@elisanet.fi>
Subject: tar failing hard link creation
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Hi,

There is something mysterious in tar with Cygwin when archive contains hard links. Similar issues have been reported earlier:
http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2006-12/msg00251.html
http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2007-01/msg00705.html

In my case, a colleague was trying to extract a pre-built cross-toolchain on his brand new WinXP laptop from a tarball I had created earlier. This tarball extracts just fine on all tried systems except this one. Cygwin setup is exactly the same as in other computers (installed from same set of packages burnt on CD-R). Cygwin root is on NTFS filesystem. Creating hard links manually using ln works fine, but tar cannot extract hard links from an archive, giving errors like:
tar: bar: Cannot hard link to 'foo': File exists

Updating to current tar (1.20) gives the exact same behavior, but made it possible to circumvent the problem by repackaging the files with the new --hard-dereference option.

/TS


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