Endless extracting of tar.bz2 archive

Funny story. Over a year ago I've backed up a project directory to tar.bz2 archive. Today I've decided to check what's inside. I've encountered a frozen window of 'extract here' option from file context menu.

I've killed the extract process and rerun it from a terminal:

tar -xvvf archive.tar.bz2

After few normal lines i've seen smth (in fact thousands of such lines):

hrwxr-x--- user/group       0 2013-02-06 23:20 workspace/a/b/a/b/f.go link to workspace/a/b/f.go
hrwxr-x--- user/group       0 2013-02-06 23:20 workspace/a/b/a/b/a/b/f.go link to workspace/a/b/a/b/f.go

This clued me, that probably the archive kept the symbolic links. After Googling and reading tar manual I had this idea: let's remove a symlink from an archive:

tar --delete -f archive.tar workspace/a/b/a

This worked just well :-)