Surprising behavior in GNU tar
Here's a fun game for you: what do you expect to be the state of the filesystem after running the following commands in an empty directory on a Linux system?
$ touch foo:bar
$ tar -cpf foo:bar.tar foo:bar
$ rm foo:bar
$ tar -xpf foo:bar.tar
Do you expect the directory to contain the files foo:bar
and foo:bar.tar
?
What if I told you that instead the directory would only contain foo:bar.tar
and stderr would say
tar (child): Cannot connect to foo: resolve failed
Yep! It turns out that GNU tar, if passed a …
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