"Stone, Todd -Systems" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Files occupy full blocks and the concern is over contents of the > unused (slack) space between the files's EOF (End-of-File) marker > and physical end of the data block as occupied on disk. This unused > data could be considered CLASSIFIED if contents aren't zeroed out. > Does or has anyone modified GNU-TAR to clear unallocated (slack) > space?
If I understand you correctly, you're extracting from a tar image to disk, and the tar image contains a file with (say) 500 bytes, but the disk blocks are 1024 bytes, so you want 'tar' to fill the extra 524 bytes with explicit zeros and then truncate the file to the proper length. It shouldn't be hard to modify GNU tar to act the way that you prefer, for your particular environment, assuming that you have access to the necessary information. However, there's no portable way to determine how much slack space there is, or to clear it. Many modern file systems don't even have a notion of "slack space" in the sense that you suggest. So I doubt whether the implementation would be portable. Anyway, this is fundamentally a file system issue, not a tar issue, and I suggest resolving it at the file system level rather than trying to modify every application that might want to create a file. _______________________________________________ Bug-tar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-tar
