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From: plocher@sally.Sun.COM (John Plocher)
Newsgroups: gnu.utils.bug,gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Re: GNU tar: Problems with filenames of more than 14 chars
Keywords: tar, sys_vs, filenames
Message-ID: <131363@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 7 Feb 90 08:16:54 GMT
References: <1990Feb5.153048.1824@orfeo.radig.de>
Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM
Reply-To: plocher@sun.UUCP (John Plocher)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 25

+-- In <1990Feb5.153048.1824@orfeo.radig.de> peter@radig.de (Peter Radig) writes
| allows only filenames with 14 chars, I had no other choice than to load
| one file, rename it, load the next file, etc.
+--

There was a very nice routine posted to sources.misc about a year ago that
used some good heuristics to convert a name from BSD (long) style to SYSV
(14 char) style.  It elided vowels, shortened multi-part names (foo.bar.baz.a.1
became foo.br.bz.a1 or some such) ...

I reworked the program into a callable function that could be given an
argument to permute the heuristics (in case 2 long names "hashed" into
the same short name) and inserted it into the
tar source (AT&T, not Gnu :-) so that it worked on pathname segments
so I could extract X11R3 source onto a Microport Vr3 machine :-)  The
mods were very simple (there is one place where a filename is extracted
from the archive and the function can be applied there...)

Now that I no longer need to use 386's with System V I no longer have that
code so I can't pass it on, but as I said, it wasn't hard...

In all, since the System V filesystem is being carried on into the Vr4 world,
adding this functionality makes lots of sense.  

  -John Plocher