Some cursory source scanning reveals this module should carp if it is unable to read symlinks. And the author notes in the CPAN POD that several bugs with symlinks have been 'fixed' without specifying what exactly was the problem. It seems Archive::Tar is an perl implementation rather than a wrapper around tar , as such maybe its not surprising that some features are missing, though I would call this a pretty serious one.

Talking out of my hat , the case may be that when putting the symlink entry into the tarfile, the symlink is opened and sysread ... which I guess depending on the underlying IO layer - would be reading the contents of the linked file.

Update: heezy Can you update your Archive::Tar , 0.07 is way down the list of revisions to this module, the symlink problem I speak of above is listed in the revisions for 0.07 but the most current version is 0.23