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

[Paul Eggert]

Heiko Voigt <address@hidden> writes:

> in this case your statement seems wrong because my "UNIX" forbids
> some characters.

I think he was talking about the original Unix.

It sounds reasonable for tar, as an option, to mangle file names that
aren't retrievable due to OS limitations.  But that is a feature
request, not a bug.  I doubt whether unusable names should be mangled
by default, as that would be a pretty big change to common practice.

In POSIX-conforming systems the issue comes up only with file names
that contain NUL bytes, or which end in '/' even though the files are
not directories.  This could be addressed by the same
feature-enhancement, I suppose.

There is a similar issue with file name components that are too long,
and it also could be handled by mangling file names (I guess with the
same user option).