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Recursive Unlink

--recursive-unlink
When this option is specified, try removing files and directory hierarchies before extracting over them. This is a dangerous option!

Some people argue that GNU tar should not hesitate to overwrite files with other files when extracting. When extracting a tar archive, they expect to see a faithful copy of the state of the filesystem when the archive was created. It is debatable that this would always be a proper behaviour. For example, suppose one has an archive in which `usr/local' is a link to `usr/local2'. Since then, maybe the site removed the link and renamed the whole hierarchy from `/usr/local2' to `/usr/local'. Such things happen all the time. I guess it would not be welcome at all that GNU tar removes the whole hierarchy just to make room for the link to be reinstated (unless it also simultaneously restores the full `/usr/local2', of course! GNU tar is indeed able to remove a whole hierarchy to reestablish a symbolic link, for example, but only if --recursive-unlink is specified to allow this behaviour. In any case, single files are silently removed.


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