Re: backslashes in filenames

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Fri, 13 Sep 2002, David Shea wrote:

> GNU tar seems to break when fed filenames on the command-line containing
> backslashes, since it tries to decode them using C-style escape sequences,
> but never encoded them to begin with.  The attached patch should fix this.
> It encodes the filenames fed to tar on the command-line, and adds a simple
> mechanism for the memory used by the freshly encoded filenames to be freed
> when the list of names is no longer needed.

IMHO, this is not a good idea.  The reason is that many places of Tar's 
code manipulate file names (e.g., to extract its directory part), and 
those places have '/' hard-coded into them.  More importantly, the Tar 
file format specifies that the directory separator must be '/'.

For these reasons, I think it's much better to handle this problem by 
converting each '\' into '/' where Tar processes command-line 
arguments.  A patch in that spirit was written for the MS-DOS/MS-Windows 
port of Tar and submitted to the maintainer long ago, and it awaits 
integration into the official sources since then.  A binary based on 
those patches can be found in the DJGPP collection of ports of GNU 
software (see http://www.delorie.com/djgpp).