How to extract a tarball on Windows that contains symlinks

Question

I'm trying to extract a tarball on Windows that contains symlinks, and I get an error: "no such file or directory", and then "tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors". I tried it with git bash tar command, then tried it with 7zip. Both have the same error.

My first question: when this failure status happens, does it stop extracting the rest of the tarball? I don't really care about the symlinks, I just want to extract what's there. The problem is that I didn't create the tarball, so I don't know how many files to expect.

The second question: is there a way to ignore these errors and continue using either tar command or 7z?

Answer 1

On Windows, I couldn't do this using the tar command that comes with Git Bash, I had to use 7zip, and the trick is to run as Administrator because only admin has the rights to create symlinks on Windows. It took me hours to figure this out. Just to confirm, if you open "Local Security Policy", and then expand "Local Policy" then click on "User Rights Assignment", you'll see "Create symbolic links". If you double-click on that, you'll see that only the Administrators group is able to do that. When I figured this out and ran 7zip in admin mode, I no longer got the error and was able to extract the tarball.