Re: [Bug-tar] Circular symlinks lead to segfault

[Paul Eggert]

Yes, it's a problem if you give 'tar' an infinite tree, because tar 
tries very hard to dump the whole thing, and having it check for loops 
would slow it down.  The simplest workaround I can think of is to not 
use -h unless you know the tree is finite.

Perhaps you could write a patch to have tar check for loops when the -h 
option is given?  It could use the hash-table code already in there.