tar 1.13 core dump

[Tom Hood]

Hi,

We are getting a consistent core dump with version 1.13 of gnu tar.
However, I do not know how
it was built (other than that it runs under Solaris 2.8...I suspect it
was built on 2.6 with the Sun 4.2 compiler), and cannot manage to
reproduce the problem with a version that I do build on Solaris 2.6 with
the Sun 4.2 compiler.

The following command causes it to crash:

   tar --create --sparse --file=/dev/rmt/0  \
        -C /datadir      objydbs/path/to/file1  \
        -C /datadir      objydbs/path/to/file2

The length of the file1 path (starting with the "o" in objydbs) is 113.
The length of the file2 path is 108

The stack trace looks like:

t_splay
t_delete
realfree
cleanfree
_malloc_unlocked
malloc
xmalloc
xstrdup
assign_string
start_header
write_long
start_header
dump_file
create_archive
main

If we swap the order of the file names (ie. so the shorter one comes
first), it no longer core dumps.  If we shrink the length of both paths
so that they are shorter than 100, it also no longer core dumps.

Are there any known problems with long file names in version 1.13 ?

Are there any known memory corruption problems in version 1.13?

I tried running the version I built through purify, but it doesn't
report any problems.

Unfortunately, the binary that is crashing and the core file are on a
disk that cannot have data taken off of it, so it will not be possible
to send you these files.

Let me know what additional information would be useful and I'll try to
find out.

Thanks,

-- Tom