Re: [Bug-tar] Tar doesn't stop tape after extracting all specified files

[Paul Eggert]

Sergey Poznyakoff <address@hidden> writes:

> I have named it --first-copy. Is this name OK?

Thinking about it a bit more, the name "copy" is a bit misleading,
since the two occurrences of the file may not be copies.  Perhaps
"occurrence" instead of "copy"?

Also, it would be useful to give the user a way to extract an
arbitrary set of files from an archive.  This could be done by having
an --occurrence=N option, to let you select the Nth occurrence of a
file from the archive.

The option should be cumulative, e.g.:

  tar --occurrence=3 foo --occurrence=2 bar

would select the 3rd occurrence of foo and the 2nd occurrence of bar.

--occurrence=1 would replace --first-copy.

For directories, I guess any clump of contiguous files whose names are
prefixed by the directory name would count as the Nth occurrence of
that directory's contents, and would be extracted unless
--no-recursion is specified.