🚀 go-pugleaf

Zenon Fortuna admirably does some testing and concludes:

>> The original posting was about tar-like program which should handle names
>> longer than 100 characters.
>> MANY PEOPLE answered, that the gnutar is the solution. Somebody is wrong   :)

gnutar is indeed *a* solution.  You did not follow your test through to
its conclusion, which is to reextract the files.  Yes, the names (including
paths) longer than 100 characters get renamed to @@MaNgLeD.n, where n is
an integer.  BUT, there is a file written at the end of the tar file that
contains the *real* names for these "mangled" file names, and when doing
a "gnutar x", this file is read and the mangled names are renamed to their
proper, longer than 100 character, full names.

I tried this on /NextDeveloper/Apps/InterfaceBuilder.app, which has many
name/paths longer than 100 characters.

I said "a" solution as opposed to "the" solution, since this doesn't
help when you want to extract a particular file without extracting all
of them.  There may be a way to do that with gnutar that I don't know,
but it would take two passes of the file, since the name information is
at the end.  Or one pass in which all the files with mangled file names
are extracted.  Actually, let me try that ...

Hmm, doesn't quite work.  A "gnutar xvf - @@MaNgLeD.\*" got all the
files like that, but at the end it was not able to rename them to where
they belonged, since the directories did not exist.  I might call this a
bug in gnutar, since I can imagine a situation in which a long name is
the only one in that directory, and then the original extract might
fail.  gnutar does seem to be able to make at least one directory down,
but maybe not more.

As someone else mentioned, bigtar is also only a partial solution, since
much of the tar functionality seems to be missing in bigtar.  Though it
does work for long names.  For backups though, I would prefer gnutar,
since I may have to restore the files on a non-NeXT machine.  I can find
or make gnutar on another machine, but not bigtar.

Mark Adler
madler@cco.caltech.edu