Hello all,
I believe there may be a bug with the GNU tar version 1.16 "--occurrence"
option: it keeps scanning to the end of the tape even after the first
occurrence of a file is found. I am using it on Slackware 10.2.
Here is an example. I have a tape with about 13GB of data, and I want to
extract a file near the beginning:
address@hidden:~$ tar --extract -vv --checkpoint=.1000 --occurrence=1
home/userID/Notes
V--------- 0/0 0 2007-02-12 23:45 February--Volume Header--
Reading `February'
....-rw-r--r-- user/users 340 1998-12-08 14:37 home/userID/Notes
..........................................................................................................................................................
(and the "dots", indicating that gnu tar is still reading the tape,
just keep on going...)
I tried it without the “--checkpoint” option, but the scanning to
the end of the archive continued. I also tried just plain
"--occurrence" (i.e., without the "=1"), specifying
"--file=/dev/st0" (my tape drive, but that is already in my $TAPE
variable), changing "--extract" to "-x" or
"--get", etc., all to no avail.
To test if the "--occurrence" option was at all working, I tried it
with "--occurrence=2" to get the second copy of my file. That worked
to the extent that the first copy was indeed skipped over. I didn't have a
second copy in the archive, however, so I don't know if the scanning would have
stopped after the second copy was found.
Thanks,
Gus Larsson