Re: [Bug-tar] Restoring part of a TAR archive: Meta information

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Hi Markus,

> When extracting part of a TAR archive any directories and files given as
> arguments on the command line a restored with the correct meta information
> (uid/gid), but higher-level directories which are created implicitly don't
> receive the correct meta data.

That's expected behavior.  By the time tar has reached the requested
file, it had already skipped the entries for its parent directories,
so it has no iformation about their ownership and modes.

>                    Nevertheless it would desirable to restore part of a
> TAR archive having the meta information of higher-level directories set
> to the original values.

That should be possible, in theory, if during archive traversal tar had
analyzed each directory member it is about to skip, to see whether it is
a prefix of one of the files requested for extraction.

Regards,
Sergey