[Bug-tar] Inconsistent ‘--auto-compress’ ( ‘-a’) Operation [v1.26-1]

[Jonathan Brooks]

Hello,

Please forgive any ignorance on my part but I noticed that tar's behavior is inconsistent or at least a bit confusing when using the ‘--auto-compress’(-a) option, which takes the suffix of the value of the -f option to determine a compression program/method, however the filename(table) in the produced archive, is not consistent in my environment.

e.g.

$ tar cavf aBinaryFilew00t.tgz aBinaryFilew00t

# aBinaryFilew00t.tar

$ tar cavf aBinaryFilew00t.tbz2 aBinaryFilew00t

# aBinaryFilew00t.tar

$ tar cavf aBinaryFilew00t.tlz aBinaryFilew00t

# aBinaryFilew00t

Notice no suffix was appended. Fortunately the file -is- actually a tar file and can be extracted.  

On a slightly different note - I was about to report that '.txz' had the an issue as well but I see it's not even listed in the manual - which is also kind of weird considering that .'xz', etc. al. is supported but no '.t' version?

It just outputs a normal uncompressed tarfile:

$ file aBinaryFilew00t.txz

# aBinaryFilew00t.txz: POSIX tar archive (GNU)

I found someone made a patch in 1.22 for .'txz' support but I guess it was missed: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2009-05/msg00003.html

Also, my v1.26-1 came packaged with cygwin.

Regards,

JB