From owner-freebsd-current  Mon Aug 16 13:35:43 1999
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Subject: gnu tar upgrade? 
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Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 13:36:08 -0700
From: "Alec Wolman" <wolman@cs.washington.edu>
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The version of tar that comes with freebsd (v1.11.2 with local
freebsd modifications) has a bug: if you attempt to copy large
files (> 2GB) it will silently truncate the large file.
To reproduce this bug, simply use 

tar cf - <dir> | (cd <newlocation>; tar xvpf -)

where <dir> is a directory that contains a large file.

There is a new version of gnu tar (v1.13) that has support for
large files.  I have tested this new version of tar on a
recent snapshot of FreeBSD-STABLE (3.2-19990810), and it works
fine with >2GB files.  I also looked at the local modifications
to the 1.11.2  version of tar, to understand how hard it would
be to upgrade.  FreeBSD has added the following behavior over
the years:

  the --unlink option:
      tar 1.13 has equivalent functionality with --unlink-first

  the --norecurse option:
      tar 1.13 has equivalent functionality with --no-recursion

  the --bzip and --unbzip options:
      tar 1.13 has equivalent functionality with the
      --use-compress-program option

  the --fast-read option:
      tar 1.13 does not have equivalent functionality

I looked at the implementation of fast-read, and it doesn't look
too hard to adapt to the new version of tar.  I could create
patches if there is interest....

Alec




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