hi folks.
i've found that when i have a file pathname that looks like a http URL, GNU tar incorrectly tries to open a http connection instead of reading the file on my disk. eg: myhost /var/tmp> tar xzpf http://hostname.here/file/path/here.tgz tar (child): Cannot connect to http: resolve failed gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file tar: Child returned status 128 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now myhost /var/tmp> ls -l ./http://hostname.here/file/path/here.tgz -rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 2962981999 May 28 13:29 ./http://hostname.here/file/path/here.tgz it of course works if i use "./http:..." as the pathname. last i looked, the opengroup/posix tar does not specify http: as a special path so i find this behaviour incorrect (and annoying.) perhaps tar should try to open() the pathname first, before trying to guess what it really is. or perhaps, it should try to open() it if the guess made turns out to be not so good. thanks, .mrg.