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Date: Sun, 19 Nov 1995 10:41:01 +1100
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199511182341.KAA09017@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org, henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu
Subject: Re: Broken ar and ranlib in -current and -stable
Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

>When doing a build with ar and ranlib versions from both -stable and -current,
>I get:

>cc -I../scnc  -c set_inn_conf.c
>rm -f libscnc_news.a
>ar vr libscnc_news.a set_inn_conf.o
>ar: creating archive libscnc_news.a
>a - set_inn_conf.o
>ranlib libscnc_news.a
>ranlib: libscnc_news.a: Inappropriate file type or format
>*** Error code 1

>Stop.

>A ls -l looks strange:

> 2 -rw-rw-r--  1 root  bin          1731 Nov  9 13:59 scnc_news.h
> 1 -rw-rw-r--  1 root  bin           756 Nov 13 16:58 Makefile
>16 -rw-rw-r--  1 root  bin         15594 Nov 14 17:48 set_inn_conf.c
> 6 -rw-r--r--  1 root  4294967294   6128 Nov 18 17:04 set_inn_conf.o
> 7 -rw-r--r--  1 root  4294967294   6196 Nov 18 17:04 libscnc_news.a

>Could this be from the latest patches to fix the odd number of files >17 long
>bugs?

The gid of your directory is apparently (gid_t)-2 = 4294967294, so new
files have this large gid.  Such gids aren't supported by ar (see ar.h).
ar of course doesn't bother to check for errors when writing the uid
or the gid (it uses %-6u%-6u format) so it writes a bogus header.

Bruce