Re: [Bug-tar] Issue with GNU Tar and HP-UX LVM v2.2 filesystems

[Nathan Stratton Treadway]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2012 at 15:10:21 +0000, Michael White wrote:
> I believe I have found a way to get the stat info you requested.  I
> found a perl one liner that appears to display the stat data.
> 
> perl -e 'print ((stat($ARGV[0]))[0]," \n");' <file>

Yes, this is what you needed....

> 
> One of you talked about signed values.   And that does appear to be
> the case.  See my output below using the above perl command.  The
> filesystem created as a HPUX LVM 2.2 does show a sign whereas the 1.0
> version created filesytem does not. So that evidently and maybe other
> items are causing GNU tar incremental to fail.
> 
> So now the big question.  What do I need to do to request a fix so GNU
> tar incremental will work for HPUX?  I would dearly love to use GNU
> tar incrementals on this platform.
> 
> cghbck a 2.2 vg
> 
> -2147475455            dev_t      st_dev       ID of device containing file

I ran into a similar problem a few years ago, and though in my case it
was the "nsec" value that was negative (due to a kernel bug), it looks
like the same thing is happening here.  

Specifically, when tar is writing the snapshot file, in the
write_directory_file_entry() function in incremen.c, it writes the
device number using:

      s = umaxtostr (directory->device_number, buf);
      fwrite (s, strlen (s) + 1, 1, fp);

-- but in your case dev_t is signed, and when device_number turns out to
be negative, using umaxtostr on it doesn't produce the expected
output.

The write_directory_file_entry function does check to see if time_t is
signed and act accordingly, so maybe something similar could be done for
dev_t, but in that case it looks like the read_incr_db_2 would also need
to be updated to handle a signed "dev" field....


                                                        Nathan



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