Re: [Bug-tar] GNU Tar 1.28 configuration test for deep directory hierarchy failing on Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan

[Jack Howarth]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 05:38:21PM +0200, Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:
> Charles Diza wrote:
>> FWIW, I hackily was able to remove the tree.  There seems to be something
>> about the name "confdir-14B---", but I could be wrong about this.  I wrote
>> a ruby script that descends the tree, renaming the Nth dir to "aN".  After
>> this, I found that (a) the tree seems to stop at the 379th level, and (b)
>> if I just cd about 30 or so levels down, "rm -rf a*" will remove everything
>> below, then I can cd back to the top of the tree and remove the whole thing.
>
> Maybe the problem is not the name but the length of the name. By making  
> it shorter, perhaps the path of the deepest directory becomes short  
> enough for 'rm' to remove it.

This is a known issue with 10.11 (radar 22356577). The bug goes latent when 
building under the Apple
sandbox which prevents the path from going beyond the POSIX limit. Currently 
the heavily recursed
subdirectories have to be deleted with somehing like...

while [[ -d confdir-14B--- ]] ; do
    if [ -d confdir-14B---/confdir-14B--- ]; then
      mv confdir-14B---/confdir-14B---  confdir-14B---.n
      rmdir confdir-14B---
      mv confdir-14B---.n confdir-14B---
    else
      rmdir confdir-14B---
    fi
done

>
>
> Regards,
> Antonio.