> Just to be clear - sysinst will tell pax/tar to carefully unlink the
> file first.  In normal operation I believe that pax/tar just open the
> file for write, you have to use the 'u' flag to tell them to unlink
> the file first.

It used to be like that, but I believe someone changed it.  It looks
like we default f_unlink to true when we build GNU tar.  Testing shows
the inode number changes, too, which is more convincing than source
browsing of GNU source this early in the morning!

I didn't check pax -- I always have to undertake a research project to
determine what the arguments are first. ;-)

Ciao,

Giles