--unlink-first isn't good enough

[Kalt, Christophe]

Hi,

i don't know all the (local) history of this, but we have a daily
process which untars files/directories.  this is done over an
existring tree.  We've longed used an option to first remove files
that already exist before replacing them.  i believe this was done
using a local modification of the code.  Anyhow, we recently upgraded
to a more recent tar, and started using --unlink-first.

The big problem with this is that --unlink-first also tried to remove
directories, which in our case is almost never possible.  While these
errors are not fatal, they cause undesired/undesirable errors messages
as well as a non zero return code.

The file attached adds a --unlink-first-nodir option which behaves the
same as --unlink-first, except that directories are left alone.

i'd appreciate this being considered for inclusion in the next release.

Thanks,
Christophe

 <<tar.diff>>

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