I have advised UNIX developers in the past on catching stupid things people do. I do stupid things from time to time. I was a tester for a number of the old Digital Corporation OS developments. For example, they put some simple catches in compilers to disallow certain command requests.
You don't have to do anything, but I just thought you might like to know and think about a warning when -f is used and a file name is not consistent with tarball names. May you never do stupid things, Vince On Thu, Aug 20, 2020 at 12:03 AM Michał Górny <mgo...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Wed, 2020-08-19 at 21:05 -0600, Vince Eccles wrote: > > Dear sirs, > > > > I worked all day on debugging some important coding in FORTRAN. It was > > tested and working. I decided it was time to tar up the new code and send > > it to a backup machine. > > > > I intended to type: > > > > tar -zcf src.tar.gz ./various_*/*.f90 *.f90 > > > > which would have places all the fortran codes in a compressed tar file > that > > I would transfer to a new machine. > > > > However, I typed: > > > > tar -zcf ./various_/*.f90 *.f90 > > > > and the tar blasted all of my fortran files. I had a backup from two days > > ago, but the lost effort was horrific. > > > > There needs to be a test to make sure stupid things don't happen. > > > > How is it supposed to know that someone's doing something stupid? > Pattern expansion is done by shell, not tar. If you want to be safer, > don't use '-f' and instead redirect stdout. > > tar -zc ./various_/*.f90 *.f90 > src.tar.gz > > -- > Best regards, > Michał Górny > >
