Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!bzs
From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Woes of absolute path names in tar
Message-ID: <23409@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 17 Jun 88 18:58:47 GMT
References: <564@tuck.nott-cs.UUCP> <1168@mcgill-vision.UUCP>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 12
In-reply-to: mouse@mcgill-vision.UUCP's message of 17 Jun 88 17:44:56 GMT


I once built a tape utility (under contract) which had the option of
passing all pathnames thru a user-provided awk program before being
used. This not only solves absolute pathname problems (trivially) but
also things like (relatively) foreign or just bogus names and the
possibility of just constructing arbitrarily fancy file selectors
(assuming that there's a way to give negative feedback, an empty
reply, just newline, would do to say "skip this file".)

Anyhow, the worst is absolute pathnames, but the suggestion above
should be little more than adding a flag and a popen() to tar.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University