On Thu, 16 Aug 2007, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> 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?
Yes.
Regards,
Al Hopper Logical Approach Inc, Plano, TX. al at logical-approach.com
Voice: 972.379.2133 Fax: 972.379.2134 Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/
