Description of problem: The man page shipped with RH/Fedora tar (which doesn't exist upstream) gives the wrong semantics for --occurrence. It claims --occurrence N will process the first N occurrences, whereas it should be --occurrences=N and it only processes the Nth, not 1-N. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): tar-1.17-4.fc8 and older versions How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Compare what "man tar" says about --occurrence with "info tar" or try this: mkdir tmp || exit cd tmp touch bug tar cvf bugs.tar bug bug bug tar --delete -f bugs.tar --occurrence 2 bug tar tvf bugs.tar tar cvf bugs.tar bug bug bug tar --delete -f bugs.tar --occurrence=2 bug tar tvf bugs.tar none of the --delete commands do what you would expect from the man page. Patch attached.
Created attachment 282061 [details] patch for tar.1 man page
It will be fixed in F8 and Fdevel. I also cloned this bug for RHEL5. Thanks for reporting.
tar-1.17-6.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update tar'