Subject: Bugs in "rm" "ls" and "tar": dates and perceived circularity
From: [email-masked] (Charles Peterson)

23 Feb 1997 22:45:15 -0800
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I have found three very troublesome bugs in GNU-Win32 beta 17.1 with NT
4.0.  They might have been reported before (but since the mailing list
doesn't seem to have an archive, I can't check).  They are not in the
FAQ.

#1: 'rm -rf' fails with a fairly simple structure:

a/b/c/b

rm: WARNING: circular directory structure.
This almost certainly means you have a corrupted directory structure.
NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER.
Cycle detected:
a/b/c/b
is the same file as
a

(Note: the first b just happens to have the same name as the second
b.  It is not a link or any such thing.)

From a MS Command prompt, 'RMDIR /S a' is successful.  (Note, the
a path is relative to /home/charles and I HAVE mounted D: as /.
If I create this structure as /a/b/c/d, rm -rf /a and rm -rf a both
still fail.)

#2:  ls -l

shows dates of DEC 31, 1969 for ALL directories.  From a MS Command,
'DIR' shows the correct dates.  However, 'dir' from bash works just
like "ls," so it means I have to keep a second MS Command window open
(for this as well as the previous problem).

#3: tar -xf

all extracted files (all happen to be in directories) also get the date
DEC 31, 1969, regardless of whether read from MS Command 'DIR' or bash
ls -l.  However, in this case, the extracted directories get the
date as of the time of extraction according to 'DIR' in a MS Command
tool.

These are pretty important problems for us.  Thanks for your time.
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