Re: bsdtar --gname switch

From: Tim Kientzle <kientzle_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:26:00 -0700
On Oct 17, 2011, at 3:25 PM, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Romain Garbage wrote:
>> 
>> According to bsdtar(1) manpage, tar has a --gname switch that permits
>> to set an arbitrary groupname in the tar archive, but:
>> $ tar -cf foo.tar --gname root bar
>> tar: Option --gname is not supported
>> 
>> I get the same error for --uname and --gid switches. I'm running
>> 9.0-BETA3 (r226421). Does this have any chances to be corrected in a
>> not to far away future?
> 
> This is, at present, a documentation bug.
> FreeBSD svn revision 207786 was "Various manpage updates, including many long-option synonyms that were previously undocumented", which added the gname long-format option to bsdtar.1.  However, this option is not present in usr.bin/tar/cmdline.c in FreeBSD head, though it was added in r2349 of upstream libarchive sources on May 1, 2010.  So, it looks like it should have been in libarchive since 2.8.4; however, pulling tarballs for 2.8.4 and 2.8.5 it does not seem that gname is listed in cmdline.c for either of them.
> 
> I'm not familiar with the libarchive release process; Tim, can you shed some insight on what happened here?

Looks like the manpage got updated to the latest version from
libarchive/trunk.  Unfortunately, some of the features described
there are not present in libarchive 2.8.

It looks like it might be easy to back port some of these
features.  They don't seem to rely on any of the deeper
changes to libarchive internals that have happened
since 2.8.

Tim
Received on Tue Oct 18 2011 - 13:25:53 UTC

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