[Bug-tar] Fwd: --index-file option not honored in combination with --verbose and output to stdout

[Martin Grill]

ah ok seems this has since been fixed.
sorry for bothering you.

 Martin


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Martin Grill <address@hidden>
Date: 17-Feb-2007 10:49
Subject: --index-file option not honored in combination with --verbose
and output to stdout
To: address@hidden


Hello,

a strange quirk had me puzzled for some time, I would class this as a
bug, although minor. What do people think?

Description:

(1)
When archiving to a file (--file=xyz.tar) one can specify the
--index-file=tar.log option together with one or two "--verbose"
options to get a list of all archived files in tar.log.

(2)
However, when specifying "-" (i.e. stdout) as output file (or omitting
the --file option altogether), it seems that tar does not honor the
"--index-file" option and always writes the verbose output to stderr.

(3) Why this is a problem:
In situations where the backup goes to a remote tape drive (by means
of redirecting the tar output on stdout through an ssh tunnel), the
file list produced by --index-file clutters up the stderr output
instead of going to a separate file. This differs from cases where the
tar is used to archive files to a local tape drive, in which case the
file list and error messages are separated properly.

(4) Workaround (?)
I managed to get the "correct" behavior by specifying
"--file=/dev/stdout" but am not sure if this might be causing other
side effects, also it might not be portable.

Any thoughts? Is this indeed a bug?

Thanks

 Martin



version info:
tar (GNU tar) 1.15.1 on gentoo linux