It appears that symlink extraction is broken in recent CVS versions of tar.
Here's a directory tree, with two symlinks: # ls -lR /tmp/test /tmp/test: total 4 -rw------- 1 root root 0 May 31 13:03 a -rw------- 1 root root 0 May 31 13:03 b drwx------ 2 root root 4096 May 31 13:23 somedir/ /tmp/test/somedir: total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 May 31 13:23 a -> ../a lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 May 31 13:23 b -> ../b Tar archive is create just fine, and is shown to contain: # ~/build/tar-cvs/src/tar -tvf /tmp/test.tar drwx------ root/root 0 2007-05-31 13:03 test/ drwx------ root/root 0 2007-05-31 13:23 test/somedir/ lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2007-05-31 13:23 test/somedir/a -> ../a lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2007-05-31 13:23 test/somedir/b -> ../b -rw------- root/root 0 2007-05-31 13:03 test/a -rw------- root/root 0 2007-05-31 13:03 test/b However, upon extraction, symlinks a and b are not created correctly, and become dead links: # mkdir extract # cd extract # ~/build/tar-cvs/src/tar -tvf /tmp/test.tar # ls -lR .: total 4 drwx------ 3 root root 4096 May 31 13:03 test/ ./test: total 4 -rw------- 1 root root 0 May 31 13:03 a -rw------- 1 root root 0 May 31 13:03 b drwx------ 2 root root 4096 May 31 13:23 somedir/ ./test/somedir: total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 1 May 31 13:25 a -> a lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 1 May 31 13:25 b -> b Mike