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Re: tar with switches leads to stack dump


I still don't see why upstream refuses to update a compressed archive, but
at least it didn't abort.

Gnu tar will not allow the use of '-r or -u' when a tar file is given on stdin.


I assume that compressed archives work using tar as a filter, instead of using potentially huge temporary files.
This means that '-r or -u' could not work with the compressed archives.




Now a small (ok... mid-sized) rant:

Apparently these operations which (the manual indicates) do not make any changes to the body of the
archive, but mearly append more data to the end requires random access to the file.


For -r, all that tar should need to do is output the input file in its entiretry, except the End_Of_File marker,
then output what 'tar -A filenames' would. Simple... Should have absolutely no need to do anything requireing random access.


For -u, things are a bit different.
It should dereference the files. The files should be placed into a dynamicly allocated (unfortunate, but I can see
no way around it for archives inputted on std-in) array of a struct similar to this:


struct input {
char[] string_that_indicates_where_the_file_is_on_the_disk;
char[] path_inside_the_archive;
int time_file_on_disk_was_last_modified;
bool there_is_a_file_with_the_same_path_inside_the_archive_last_modified_at_the_same_time_or_after_
time_file_on_disk_was_last_modified;
}


Hmm... I guess those strings would also need to go on the heap. Anyway, scan the input while duping it to standard out,
setting the bools as needed, again leaving off the the End_Of_File marker. Then append what "tar -A filesWithBoolSetToFalse" would output.




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