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From: rees@pisa.citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Another NFS gotcha
Message-ID: <508478b3.1bc5b@pisa.citi.umich.edu>
Date: 22 Mar 91 14:38:22 GMT
References: <HANCHE.91Mar21205748@hufsa.imf.unit.no>
Sender: usenet@terminator.cc.umich.edu (usenet news)
Reply-To: rees@citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Organization: University of Michigan IFS Project
Lines: 15

In article <HANCHE.91Mar21205748@hufsa.imf.unit.no>, hanche@imf.unit.no (Harald Hanche-Olsen) writes:

  % tar cvf /dev/null fixes
  tar: ERROR!! Cannot archive fixes.  It is of type nfs_dir.

This isn't a bug in nfs, it's a bug in tar.  Apollo tar is badly broken and
always has been.  I use John Gilmore's tar, and it works fine on nfs files
(and afs files, and v2 files).  I made a few tweaks to get it to work better
with the Apollo typed file system, but this isn't strictly necessary.

This bug is especially appalling because the text of the error message
indicates that someone intentionally introduced this bug -- it wasn't just a
side-effect.  Someone was seriously confused.

You can get my version of Gilmore tar by ftp from dabo.citi.umich.edu.