[vox-tech] tar question

[Peter Jay Salzman]

begin Shawn P. Neugebauer <spn@ucdavis.edu> 
> On Tuesday 04 June 2002 02:23 pm, you wrote:
> > On Tuesday 04 June 2002 12:54 pm, you wrote:
> >
> > > it _sucks royally_ that tar seems to destroy the archive when you delete
> > > an unknown file:
> > >
> > >    p@satan% file test.tar
> > >    test.tar: GNU tar archive
> > >    p@satan% tar f test.tar --delete "test/biteme"
> > >    tar: test/biteme: Not found in archive
> > >    tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
> > >    p@satan% file test.tar
> > >    test.tar: data
> >
> > it also deletes the archive if you don't list a file (or files).  yes, this
> > is weird and were it not consistent i would call it a bug, but it's
> > probably some kind of "feature."
> 
> well, this *is* a bug!  i noticed it when testing stuff to answer pete's
> question, but ignored it.  then we pete mentioned it again, i started
> poking around.  can't find any mention of it anywhere.  however, the
> tar man/info page at gnu.org says
>   "if you list no member names, nothing will be deleted"
> and this is clearly violated.  as pete noticed, it also destroys the
> archive if a member name is not actually a member.
> 
> i reported this to bugzilla.redhat.com for version 7.1 and got a
> quick reply that "it works in 7.3."  however, i just tested it with 7.3
> and it's broken there, too; i added a comment to this.
> 
> FYI, this is tar-1.13.19-4 on RH 7.1 and tar-1.13.25-4 on RH 7.3.
 
i filed a bug report with debian about an hour ago.  hopefully it'll
find its way upstream.

i'm shocked that the bug exists.  you'd think that someone, somewhere
would've stumbled across this data corruption bug and reported it.

guess not too many people use the --delete option!   prolly because it's
so unintuitive.  or maybe people just got tired of having their archives
corrupted.   lol!  :-)

i'll post any results i get from the debian tar package manager.

pete