Hi Mark, > Basically, when you specify --format=v7, GNU tar creates archives with > entries for directories, which is incorrect. They should be omitted from > v7-format archives.
Actually, that was the behavior of very early versions of GNU tar. It was changed around February, 1997, so that tar began accepting directories when in "old archive" mode. This change was followed by the inclusion of the old.sh test case[1] (presently old.at), which explicitly tests that directories be accepted in "old archive" mode. I don't know what was the rationale for that change, but I suppose that it had something to do with the fact that Makefiles produced by Automake use the -o option to create what was called "v7 archives". Perhaps Paul can give some more insight. It is rather easy to fix, but care should be taken not to break the Automake functionality. I will see what can be done. Regards, Sergey [1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/commit/?id=4cc7679c2bb76136713d2a2c1527e6ece0cf2c8e
