Hi all, On 09/12/12 07:59, Sorin Stefan Nicolin wrote: > I am using tarsnap with the --quiet option but is still get warnings like > these (which I think are harmless): > tarsnap: var/www/xxx:Can't translate pathname 'var/www/xxx' to UTF-8
Yes, those are harmless, unless you want to extract an archive onto a system with different locale settings *and* get pathnames translated. The file is being stored, but its path is being stored as a "raw" sequence of bytes rather than being converted to UTF-8 and stored that way. This is really something of a "POSIX is weird" issue -- because the "pax" format (which is a sort of extended tar format, and is what tar actually uses these days) was designed for copying data between machines, it says that names should be converted to UTF-8 when archives are created and then converted back when archives are extracted. This makes for that purpose, but doesn't make so much sense when tar is used for *backups*, since in general backups will be extracted on the same (or very similar) systems to where they were created. My current plan is to 1. Disable archive name translation by default, 2. Add a --translate-pathnames option which turns it back on, and 3. Silence the warning if --quiet is used. -- Colin Percival Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid
