I'm running cygwin 1.5.5-1 on win2k and finally figured out that when attempting to untar a tarball containing a file with a timestamp of 1/1/1970, it fails - in this case, killing cpan:
tar: libwww-perl-5.76/README: Cannot utime: Invalid argument This makes sense since window's epoch is 1/1/1980, making it impossible to accurately transcript the true (though perhaps bogus) modification date. I presume that all dates prior to 1980 would be problematic. Seems to me that tar should do the best it can by setting the timestamp to 1/1/1980 and issue a warning, but not fail. I'm new to the group and searched the archives, but not seen this issue addressed. And I'm not sure if this is really a bug in tar, but the *nix folks won't ever encounter this problem. Thanks, Marco Moreno -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
