Re: [Bug-tar] Re: tar 1.15.90 released

[Sergey Poznyakoff]

Helmut Waitzmann <address@hidden> wrote:

> You are right:
>    $ printf '%s\n' -C nothing | tar --files-from=- -c -f archive.tar
>    tar: nothing: Cannot chdir: No such file or directory
>    tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
> 
>    $ printf '%s\0' -C nothing | tar --files-from=- -c -f archive.tar --null

Well, piping file list to `tar -T' requires some special care anyway,
it's not only dashes that can cause the confusion, non-ascii symbols or
characters below ascii 32 can make -T malfunction as well. I'd
recommend using 0 as file list separator in this case, as you did in
your second try (find -print0 . | tar -T- ...). This causes tar to
disable any special handling of file list contents and to assume
each list entry is a file name. By the way, you need not specify --null
explicitely: if the input list is zero-separated, tar will enable this
option automatically.

> Will this behavior stay the same with new gnu tar, too?

I see nothing particularly wrong in handling options coming from the
file list, on the contrary, it is a very useful feature and actually 
it appeared because there was a demand for this case of
functionality. Besides, it is easy to turn it off, and for the case when
producing zero-separated lists is somehow undesirable, I will provide a
--literal-file-from option, proposed by Matt.

Regards,
Sergey