archiver bug ?
 

Hello,

I'm using ubuntu. Two strange things happened when I used my archiver.
The archiver I used is just the one provided by my system (I guess, although I wasn't the one who installed the system so I can't be sure). I right-clicked and pressed "compress...". I don't know its name.
The thing I tried to compress was a directory "Dir", roughly 3MB. It included some files and directories, and a link called "Security" pointing to "Dir".
The first problem that occurred was that the archive that was made weighted roughly 100MB. So my first question is, why didn't it either go into an infinite loop or ignore the "Security" link (and is it possible to make the archiver ignore such recursive links) ?
The second problem was that the archive was made invisible, and I had to set show hidden files to force it to be displayed. Why is that ?

Thanks.

Possibly the hidden archive you are looking at is the temporary file that was being built. When the archiver (named file-roller) failed (after recursing down the circular link a lot of times) the temporary file was not removed.

Ok, this seems a very logical explanation, thanks. Is there a way to configure it to ignore circular links ?

You might find a tick box on the 'add files/folder' page that allows you to exclude symbolic links.