[Bug-tar] Small errors detected on tar Manual (Version 1.22, 5 March 2009)

[Victor Villa]

Hi.
While going through parts of the tar manual I found some mistakes (or
so they seem to me).  The version of the manual I read is labeled as
"version 1.22, 5 March 2009" and is located on
http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/tar.html

My native language is not English, so I could be wrong about a couple of these.

Thank you for a great program and manual.  My best regards.

Victor Villa


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- In section 2.7, inside the Tutorial Introduction to tar, old-style
options are used during an example but in that part of the manual
they're still not explained, just barely mentioned.  The problem is
that although the command is correct, just in section 2.6.5 where
short forms were introduced it is explained that the character just
after the -f option will be taken as the archive name and an example
is given where the command "tar -cfv collection.tar..." would probably
not produce the expected result.  This use of the old-style options
could lead to newcomers to tar (like me) would think the command is
wrong altogether, or confuse the old-style option with a short form
and think the manual made the mistake it just warned about.


$ tar cfv archive /etc/mail
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
/etc/mail/
/etc/mail/sendmail.cf
/etc/mail/aliases
$ tar tf archive
etc/mail/
etc/mail/sendmail.cf
etc/mail/aliases


- In section 3.1, I think there's a missing "be":

"Some errors are such that it would not (be) meaningful, or at least
risky, to continue processing: tar then aborts processing
immediately."


- In section 3.2, it is mentioned that there are two lists of four
operations each when in reality they have 3 and 5 operations:

"(two lists of four operations each may be found at The Three Most
Frequently Used Operations and The Five Advanced tar Operations)"


- In the following sentence from section 3.7, I think the second "if"
should be an "is":

"As of now, if the archive if (is) properly terminated with a NUL
block, the reading of the file may stop before end of file is met..."


- In this sentence from section 4.5, I think "has" should be "as":

"making different members appear has (as) having similar names through
the side-effect of name truncation"