I just did some similar tests of tar: tar appears to store a correct, full precision mtime in a .tar file, and use that full precision mtime when deciding whether to write a new copy of a file when processing -u option.
However, it does NOT set the mtime the full precision when files are extracted from the .tar file. It only restores the integral part of the second. The fractional part is all zeros. This is not as troublesome as is the behavior of cp, just muddled. i.e., even in a really trivial case, the extracted file system is not identical to the original. Oops! Maybe all this has been fixed. I'm working with Debian Sarge. My cp version is cp (coreutils) 5.2.1 My tar version is tar (GNU tar) 1.14 -- Paul E Condon [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
