On Tue, 15 Jul 2008, Kent Johnson wrote: > What version of Python are you using? I have 2.5.2 and the line > numbers in my tarfile.py are quite different than yours. The changelog > for Python 2.5.2 shows many fixes to tarfile so an upgrade may be in > order.
And that was it! I pulled the most current version from http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/tarfile.py , saved it as "tarfilex.py" and used "import tarfilex as tarfile", and it's now working. You know how sometimes when you're a newbie, every time you get an unexpected result, you jump to "there must be a bug in the program I'm using"? Well, I've been programming long enough that I tend to assume the opposite: "I must be doing something wrong." > My version of the source picks up a prefix string and adds it to the > start of the path unless the file is a "GNU sparse" file. I saw that too, but it still struck me as odd. For one thing, I don't understand where sparseness of the tar file (which has to do with whether tar bothers storing all of "sparse" files -- files that have data space allocated but not initialized) would have anything to do with a file name. That's one of the things that led to my "the deeper I look into this, the more mystified I become" comment. For another thing, "prefix" still isn't documented; I'd have expected the variable name to be along the lines of _prefix, or not retained in the class instance if it wasn't intended for consumption. But that might just be my naivete. Anyway, problem solved. Thanks, Kent. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
