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 -- this space intentionally left blank _______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"