Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 20:48:17 +0000 From: "Stefan A. Deutscher" <sa.deutscher@tiscali.de> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: two tar issues: man page and --totals behaviour Message-ID: <20040609204817.A1736@tiscali.de>
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Hi folks,
just noticed two issues with tar on FreeBSD 5.1 (actually, it is
GNU tar 1.13.25):
(1) The man page is somewhat out of sync with what tar --help shows
in terms of options
Should I submit a PR for that one, or send a bug report to the gnu
tar maintainers, or both?
(2) The option --totals, according to the docs and --help, is supposed
to show the bytes _written_. It does not quite:
- When running plain 'tar c', it actually shows the bytes written.
- When running tar with any of the built-in compression flags, such
as 'tar -c -{z,Z,y}', it shows the exact same number of bytes as
when invoked without these flags.
While, technically, it might show the bytes written _to_ the
compression program, for all practical purposes it appears to show
what was _read_ from disk. The space used on tape may be
significantly smaller.
I understand that for backwards compatibility one cannot just change
the behaviour of this flag from one day to another. Fixing the docs
might be the easy way out, but I'd like to suggest the addition of
some flag that reports what was actually written _to_ the tape
device.
Even if the device-internal HW compression may change what actually
ends up on tape (i.e. compressing uncompressed stuff somewhat while
probably not gaining anything on gzip or bzip2), this would give a
better indicator of tape usage and space left on a tape.
I have no idea whether this has been discussed here already, google
didn't like me enough to turn up relevant threads. Nor do I know how
the upcoming bsdtar handles that flag's behaviour.
Again, should I submit a PR for that one, or send a bug report to
the gnu tar folks, or both?
Cheers,
Stefan
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