[vox-tech] tar question

[Shawn P. Neugebauer]

On Tuesday 04 June 2002 04:07 pm, you wrote:
[snip]
> i'm shocked that the bug exists.  you'd think that someone, somewhere
> would've stumbled across this data corruption bug and reported it.

i've been looking at the source for a bit, and it's not trivial code (not
hard, but not trivial).  one observation i have is that there are only two
very simple regression checks for the delete option, yet there's an
entire source file (120 lines of C) devoted to it.  IOW, the regression
checks are on the sparse side.

> 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 think this is correct.  as i mentioned, this option did not exist on the
major unices.  it's unusual for a tar file to be any kind of "living" file.  
how often would you manipulate it file-by-file?  it's usually used to capture
state, move it or hold it, and possibly restore it. 

shawn.