Re: Possible bug in tar

[Rick Coupland]

I am embarrassed to admit that I managed to lose the original archive
which had the problem.  The problem occurred at a very busy time
for me and I set the file aside meaning to come back to it later.

However, when I attempted to do the same thing again with a later version
of the files, I a was able to reproduce a problem.  I am not certain that
this is the same problem but it is reproducible.

Although I first thought there was a file missing when I restored the archive,
I have now discovered that the file is restored & the contents are correct but
the file name is incorrect.  It is missing the last character.  Also, I have
verified that this only happens to one file out of 4,045 files in the archive.

I tried reproducing the problem with some of the directories left out to
produce a smaller archive but it didn't work.  I have rebuilt the archive
without compression and still have the same problem.  I have also
confirmed that the archive restores correctly with the Solaris tar.

The path name of the file which is being restored with the wrong name is
"webpac/src/com/eldocomp/webpac/corebus/datagrapes/appldefs/insurer/datagrapes/CLTranslationGrape.jvp".
It is restored as "CLTranslationGrape.jv".  It also shows up with the last
character of the name missing on a "tar tv".

I have now reproduced the problem with a zapped version of all of
the source files (every printable character replaced with a "Z").  The
resulting archive, compressed with bzip2 is about 2 MB.  Where
would you like me to put it?


Rick Coupland

At 10:06 AM 3/18/2002 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> First, try reproducing the problem without using bzip2.  It could
> be a bzip2 bug, or a compatibility issue.
>
> If you can reproduce the problem with plain tar, try reproducing it
> again with a copy of the files in which every byte is replaced with
> a newline byte.