[ale] tar problem

[Bob's ALE Mail]

> From: Ken Nagorski <kenn at pcintelligent.com>
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: [ale] tar problem

> 	Wow this is weird problem. I am tarring up a bunch of directories
> and they huge. Tar works, no errors but when I ftp the files over I
> missing random things? I haven't ever had a problem like this before. I
> there a limit to how large an archive can be and still be reliable? 

> Any Ideas?

You are not specific.  Are you transfering the single tar archive file
with FTP and trying to extract that and things are missing?  If so,
the problem likely is with your tar archive before the FTP transfer.
(You always can use "sum foo.tar" on each side to verify that FTP did not
corrupt the file, though it is extremely unlikely that FTP would corrupt
a file due to the checksumming in the TCP protocol.)

The tar program is extremely reliable.  However, old versions of it
(that do not have the GNU enhancement) cannot handle extremely long file
names so those files do not get added to the archive.

Another problem is that you are extracting as other than root, if tar
extracts a directory that does not already exist, it will create it
_with the ownership and modes specified on the tape_.  If the user invoking
tar does not have permissions on that dir then no files will be extracted
into that dir.


If you have the name of a particular file that did not get on the archive
I suggest the following to try to figure it out.

# script tar.log
# tar -cvf foo.tar dir_tree
# exit

Then edit tar.log with your favorite editor and search for the missing file
and observe the error message.

An occasional problem is that a very large file will not be extracted due
to lack of disk space.

> Thanks
> Ken

Bob Toxen
bob at cavu.com
http://www.cavu.com
Fly-By-Day Consulting, Inc.       "Don't go with a fly-by-night outfit!"
Quality Linux & UNIX security and software consulting since 1990.

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