Problems with tar-1.13

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 03:34:59PM -0500, kurt.wall at timesys.com wrote:
>Typing furiously on March 05, Bill Campbell managed to emit:
>> I recently disovered a problem with tar-1.13 where it has
>> apparently changed option handling (one of my least favorite
>> traits of free software :-).  The ``-L size'' option that has
>> been working for years on tar-1.12 and earlier now fails saying
>> ``Invalid tape length''.  The relevant part of the command that
>> has been working for at least ten years (under other *ix) is:
>> 	tar -c -L 3800000 -b 20 -f /dev/st0 ...
>
>It works here on my tar:
>
>$ tar --version
>tar-1.13.19

What distribution?  Can you point to SRPMS so I can compare with
the Caldera versions?  I have a RedHat 7.1 system here reporting
that size, but the Source CD doesn't have SRPMS for tar-1.13.19-4.

>$ tar -c -L 3800000 -b 20 -f /tmp/foo $HOME
>tar: Remvoing leading `/' from member names
>[wait wait wait]
>
>I don't have a tape drive handy to test that feature, however. I'm
>guessing you've a bad tape? I don't see anything in the release
>notes indicating changed behavior for the -L option; v1.12 and v1.13
>both take -L NUM, multiplying NUM by 1024 to get the tape size.

It isn't the tape drive.  I've looked at the source enough to see
that this is in the basic getopts processing, long before it even
looks at the tape.  It fails without looking at the ``-b'' option
so specify block size.

Bill
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