Glenn Fowler <gsf at research.att.com> wrote: > > > > Don should know that there is no POSIX violation. He did not prove his > > > > claim > > > > with a pointer to the POSIX standard, judge yourself whom to > > > > believe..... > > > > > > http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/tar.html > > > > > > It says nothing about (mis)interpreting an absolute path name as a > > > relative one, or about switching that behavior on or off. > > > Correct, it does not forbid the behavor that has been chosen to make tar > > more > > safe. > > apologies for posting to a closed case > but I can't let this one go > an application does not have carte blanche to do operation X simply > because the standard does not forbid operation X
The POSIX standard intends to offer a complete description of the intended behavior of a program. If you believe that a description is missing, feel free file a defect report. > e.g., "it didn't say I couldn't kill(-1,9)" > > there are other complications > suppose the archive contains the symbolic link > /somedir/foo -> /dev/null Let me try to argue different... do the following: wget ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/star/testscripts/remove.tar echo > f1 tar xf remove.tar ls -l f1 If you do this with Sun tar, you get this: ls -l f1: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden star tvf remove.tar 0 Hrw-r--r-- root/berlios Jul 25 20:06 2003 f1 link to f1 Would you request this dangerous behavior to be mandatory just because it is undocumented by POSIX but "implemented" by traditional UNIX archivers? J?rg -- EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
