Re: [Bug-tar] mac os x or general charset problem patch

[Paul Eggert]

Heiko Voigt <address@hidden> writes:

> i had problems with extracting archives on mac os x which were packed
> with a different charset on a linux box. These errors resulted in
> errors like this:
>
> tar: home/sigrid/Office51/database/Adre\337buch.url: Cannot open: (null)

Was the "\377" four different characters "\", "3", "3", "7", or does
this represent a single byte in the actual tar output?

That "(null)" indicates that something went seriously wrong on your
host, in that errno was set to a value such that strerror (errno)
returned a null pointer.  Can you use a debugger to see what might
have caused that?  Perhaps, if we can fix the underlying problem, then
we won't need the quick and dirty workaround that you mentioned.