Hi Benno, > But when I try to do something like: > > tar -A -f 11.tar 22.tar 33.tar > > only 22.tar is appended to 11.tar, and 33.tar is silently ignored.
As a matter of fact, both are appended. You can easily confirm that if you used the -i option when testing the resulting archive, like that: tar -t -i -f 11.tar The problem here is that the append operation concatenates all files listed in the command line verbatim, including their terminating zero blocks. Before appending, however, tar seeks in the target archive (the one given with the -f option) to the offset right before its terminating zero blocks. As a result, first file is concatenated to the target archive without two zero blocks in between, whereas the remaining files are appended preserving zero blocks at the end of each of them (assuming they are valid tar archives). When testing or extracting the archive, operation stops when first two zero blocks are encountered. Hence the need for the -i (--ignore-zeros) option when reading such archives. That being said, I agree that this mode of operation is confusing and had better be fixed. Regards, Sergey
