Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!indetech!cirrus!dhesi From: dhesi@cirrus.com (Rahul Dhesi) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: help! tar archive paradox Message-ID: <1991Jun26.015356.23470@cirrus.com> Date: 26 Jun 91 01:53:56 GMT References: <1991Jun11.173147.3324@cirrus.com> <1991Jun15.150346.24206@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> <15618@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU> Sender: news@cirrus.com Organization: Cirrus Logic Inc. Lines: 51 I wanted to make a tar archive that contains all tar archives that do not contain themselves. Richard Sutton writes: But what will contain the tar archive that contains all tar archives that do not contain themselves? Therein lies the paradox! I got quite a bit of email about my original query. Some guy mentioned a Barber in Seville who shaves people instead of cutting their hair. (I think this is an opera or something. Personally, I prefer a good symphony, because opera singers waver their voices so much. Anyway, I doubt that any opera would be about tar archives.) Also one guy said that his 64-character screen was too small so he couldn't answer the question in the margin. I kind of think he was making fun of me, because everybody is using machines these days with large screens. (You should see some of the tiny fonts people use around here on their Sun workstations -- they can fit 200 or more characters on a line, and I can barely read them. And to think that just a few years ago we were all using VIC-20s with 22-character screens! Technology has really come a long way. Although, as my question shows, they haven't gotten all the glitches out of tar archive handling.) Anyway, this is Usenet, and I'm used to somebody posting a perfectly innocent question and getting lots of flippant answers. So, in response to Richard's question which I quoted above, I know exactly where to put the tar archive! I was thinking of buying a CD-ROM drive. (You can buy these real cheap from DAK, though I don't know about the quality.) They can hold a lot of data these days. 500-600 M today, I'm sure gigabytes in the future. Also, pretty soon you will be able to record on these things. By the way, I tried the -russell option to tar, and the program just complained. I'm using tar on a Sun, so maybe I need to use gnu tar or something. Actually I was trying to compile a public domain tar, and I saw a source file that tried to #include all files that didn't include themselves, through some real complicated set of macros. The C compiler gave a fatal error at that point. Maybe I need to see if gcc can handle the code. If I can get that free tar compiled, it might do what I need, or maybe I could modify it to do it. Thanks to all for the comments. I'll keep on trying to get tar to do what I want. -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: oliveb!cirrusl!dhesi