On Sun, 13 Mar 2005, Han Boetes wrote:

> Hi,
>
> If I make a tarball with tar I get a slightly different result with tar
> and gtar: The difference is the trailing / for the dirname `foo.'
>
> ~% mkdir foo
> ~% touch foo/bar
> ~% tar czf 1.tgz foo
> ~% gtar czf 2.tgz foo
>
> ~% tar tzf 1.tgz
> foo
> foo/bar
> ~% tar tzf 2.tgz
> foo
> foo/bar
>
> ~% gtar tzf 1.tgz
> foo
> foo/bar
> ~% gtar tzf 2.tgz
> foo/
> foo/bar
>
>
> Now reading the sourcecode: /usr/src/bin/pax/tar.c
>
> /*
> * strip off any trailing slash.
> */
> if (*pt == '/') {
> *pt = '\0';
> --arcn->nlen;
> }
>
> So it is done on purpose. But it is incompatible with gtar. And I just
> happen to run into a situation where this behaviour is required, so I
> would like to request the change of this behaviour. Or perhaps somebody
> can enlighten me why this is the prefered behaviour.
>
> Of course I have no say in this, I can only ask kindly.

I do not think you ever tested your suggestion. It is in a piece of code
that reads old-style tar archives.

This is the piece of code that _is_ relevant:

/*
* Some programs that create ustar archives append a '/'
* to the pathname for directories. This clearly violates
* ustar specs, but we will silently strip it off anyway.
*/
if (arcn->name[arcn->nlen - 1] == '/')
arcn->name[--arcn->nlen] = '\0';


As you can see with hexdump -C of archives created by gtar, gtar is such a
program. I do not feel like changing tar just to accomodate non-conforming
programs.

-Otto