Hello, a strange quirk had me puzzled for some time, I would class this as a bug, although minor. What do people think?
Description: (1) When archiving to a file (--file=xyz.tar) one can specify the --index-file=tar.log option together with one or two "--verbose" options to get a list of all archived files in tar.log. (2) However, when specifying "-" (i.e. stdout) as output file (or omitting the --file option altogether), it seems that tar does not honor the "--index-file" option and always writes the verbose output to stderr. (3) Why this is a problem: In situations where the backup goes to a remote tape drive (by means of redirecting the tar output on stdout through an ssh tunnel), the file list produced by --index-file clutters up the stderr output instead of going to a separate file. This differs from cases where the tar is used to archive files to a local tape drive, in which case the file list and error messages are separated properly. (4) Workaround (?) I managed to get the "correct" behavior by specifying "--file=/dev/stdout" but am not sure if this might be causing other side effects, also it might not be portable. Any thoughts? Is this indeed a bug? Thanks Martin version info: tar (GNU tar) 1.15.1 on gentoo linux
