Re: [Bug-tar] Appending file(s) to tar file may silently fail

[Markus Steinborn]

Hi Hendrik,

Hendrik Grewe schrieb:
> If one tries to append a file to an existing .tar file through
>
>    tar --append --file defective.tar fileToAdd.xxx
>
> tar may return exit code 0 and terminate without error though the
> fileToAdd.xxx is not added to the .tar file. However the tarfile has
> been changed in some kinde since md5sums of defective.tar befor the
> non working call and after the call differ.
Something is broken here. If I add a fle (let's say "mkdvdiso.sh") to
the archive (only once), checking the result with "tar -tvf
defective.tar" reveals that

-rw------- postgres/postgres   8192 2014-11-12 15:57 global/pg_control

is missing in the tar file (compared to the original tar file). star
confirms this diagnostic. So GNU tar's append clearly removes a file,
which is obviously another bug.


Greetings

Markus Steinborn