Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
List-Subscribe: <mailto:cygwin-subscribe AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Archive: <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/>
List-Post: <mailto:cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
List-Help: <mailto:cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com>, <http://sources.redhat.com/ml/#faqs>
Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Message-ID: <0c6501c1bed4$f548d5e0$0300a8c0@bluebox>
From: "Eugene Rosenzweig" <eugenius AT dingoblue DOT net DOT au>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: tar -f behaviour
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 01:50:38 +1100
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000

Looking at tar I noticed a small oddity in its behaviour, as compared to
what I would have thought was 'normal'
When dealing with files, using dash before options, the 'f' option has to be
the last one in the option string, e.g.
tar -tfz tarball.tar.gz
works while
tar -ftz tarball.tar.gz
doesn't reporting that file 'tz' does not exist.
It seems that 'f' anything after the 'f' option is considered to be the
archive filename.
tar -f tarball.tar.gz -tz
works.
When dash is absent the oddity is absent too,
tar ftz tarball.tar.gz
works with options f, t and z in any combination whatsoever.

There is no tar manpage on my system. I looked at 'tar --help' for option
explanation which didn't offer anything and I compared with linux tar
behaviour. The linux version doesn't exhibit any pickiness about position of
'f' option when dash is being used. I do not have any experience with unix
command line parsing but I wonder if the presence of this behaviour only
when there is a dash indicates it has got something to do with getopt() or
popt? I do not seem to have manpage for getopt() either even though it is
references in popt manpage.

In conclusion, is this a bug or a feature?


PS I checked the package listing on http://cygwin.com, there is no man page
with tar distribution. There is tar.texi in the source package. Maybe there
should be manpage in the binary package.


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Bug reporting:         http://cygwin.com/bugs.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/