Re: I am so sad.

[Joerg Schilling]

Vince Eccles <vince.eccles@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have advised UNIX developers in the past on catching stupid things people 
> do. I do stupid things from time to time.  I was a tester for a number of the 
> old Digital Corporation OS developments. For example, they put some simple 
> catches in compilers to disallow certain command requests.
>
> You don't have to do anything, but I just thought you might like to know and 
> think about a warning when -f is used and a file name is not consistent with 
> tarball names.

As mentioned before: there is already a long existing practice on ow to avoid 
this kind of problems:

-       The official CLI from tar does not use a dash before options,
        but rather calls the characters key-letters. Tar is not using
        a CLI that is compatible to typical UNIX programs but to "ar"
        and to the old "ps" interface from the 1970s.

-       Forbid to truncate existing files, i.e. abort if the CLI
        is risky and the file exists with a size >0

-       When called with a dash in front of the key letters, do not
        permit non-boolean keyletters tobe combined as a single
        argument.

Jörg

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