tar under Interactive unix

[Ti Kan]

In article <1990Oct09.114759.1025 at virtech.uucp> cpcahil at virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
>In article <3494 at skye.ed.ac.uk> richard at aiai.UUCP (Richard Tobin) writes:
>>Can it really be that under Interactive "tar cv" writes the names of the
>>files to standard output, so that "tar cvf -" produces a corrupted file?
>
>Yes. (so you have to use tar cf - or tar cvf file to get a good tar file).
>
>>Is this standard System V brain damage?
>
>I believe it is. (Interactive would not be so stupid as to add this 
>blunder to the code).
>

tar cv and xv should output the file listing to stderr, not stdout.
AT&T's Sys V.3 source code is correct, but many 386 UNIX vendors did
not use AT&T's tar sources.  Rather, they used the Microsoft tar source
which came from Xenix.  The Microsoft tar has the wrong behavior of
writing the file listing to stdout.

For the record, all current Altos UNIX (not Xenix) releases for all its
systems has the correct tar behavior.  Although our tar sources are
derived from Microsoft's base, we have corrected the problem.

On a side note, the V.4 tar source from AT&T appears to be a modified
version of Microsoft's tar, not AT&T V.3's.  Thus, the aforementioned
bug is re-introduced into AT&T's own sources!  Ugh.

-Ti
-- 
Ti Kan | vorsprung durch technik!                                       \\\
Internet: ti at altos.com                                                   \\\
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