jar always follows symbolic links and as far as I know there is
no option to prevent it from doing so. So if you have a symlink
in your filesystem like "lib -> .." you throw jar into an infinite
loop. When creating an archive on UNIX you almost never want to
follow symlinks.

By default tar does not follow symbolic links. Also zip provides a 
way to not follow symlinks (-y).

I consider this a bug not an RFE since it is such a glaring omission.

N/A

Unfortunately, there is no way to detect a symbolic link in Java so
I am reclassifying this as an RFE.

  xxxxx@xxxxx   1998-06-23

Will not fix. Win32 does not even support symbolic link. Requiring to support
this in java would not be clean and easy.


  xxxxx@xxxxx   1998-07-10

Hmh, strange opinion (1998-07-10): If <your-favourite-system>
does not have <your-favourite-feature> Java will not have
the feature? What about AWT and the many many systems
without graphic displays? Drop AWT?

Hmh, strange opinion (1998-07-10): If <your-favourite-system>
does not have <your-favourite-feature> Java will not have
the feature? What about AWT and the many many systems
without graphic displays? Drop AWT?

I don't understand why you would say that to support this would not be clean or easy!  Just add an isLink method 
(similar to isFile and isDirectory).  In Win32, just return false all of the time.  In Unix/Linux... return the truth.