Tarring a directory (only a directory, not its contents) 
with the tar program results in 
 
user@host:~$ mkdir tmp 
user@host:~$ tar --no-recursion -cf sample.tar tmp/ 
user@host:~$ tar tfv sample.tar  
drwxr-xr-x user/user 0 2004-09-20 12:55:27 tmp/ 
 
Using the Python `tarfile' module, the result is 
 
user@host:~$ python 
... 
>>> t = tarfile.open( 'sample.tar', 'w') 
>>> t.add( 'tmp', recursive = False) 
... 
user@host:~$ tar tfv sample.tar  
drwxr-xr-x user/user 4096 2004-09-20 12:55:27 tmp/ 
 
But there are no 4096 Bytes in the tar file. If this 
is not actually a bug, I would like to propose it to 
be one. 
 
I may provide a solution to this at 
<http://www.bertram-scharpf.de/tmp/tarfile.tar.gz> 
 
Bertram 

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This was fixed in tarfile.py 1.16