[Help-tar] Re: [Bug-tar] file name with backslash is not archived

[Paul Eggert]

On 11/02/10 14:04, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
> I would ask you to keep that patch in stash for a
> while, and return to that question after the release.

Sure, that's fine.

In the meantime I'll CC: this to help-tar, so that people there
are aware of the situation.  Briefly, the proposal is to change
GNU tar so that:

tar -cf ../archive.tar *

works regardless of the file names that "*" expands to.  Currently,
if one of the file names contains backslash-backslash, or backslash-n,
those sequences are interpreted as backslash and as newline,
respectively, which means the "tar" command won't behave as
expected.

This behavior was recently pointed out as a bug here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2010-10/msg00083.html

with a followup thread here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2010-11/msg00004.html

The current 'tar' behavior has been present, as far as I know,
for decades.  However, it was a surprise to me (a longtime
GNU tar maintainer and contributor) when it was pointed out a
few days ago, and it cannot be well known.  The behavior breaks
some programs that use GNU tar, such as file-roller, and it's
incompatible with non-GNU versions of tar.