Looking at tar I noticed a small oddity in its behaviour, as compared to what I would have thought was 'normal' When dealing with files, using dash before options, the 'f' option has to be the last one in the option string, e.g. tar -tfz tarball.tar.gz works while tar -ftz tarball.tar.gz doesn't reporting that file 'tz' does not exist. It seems that 'f' anything after the 'f' option is considered to be the archive filename. tar -f tarball.tar.gz -tz works. When dash is absent the oddity is absent too, tar ftz tarball.tar.gz works with options f, t and z in any combination whatsoever.
There is no tar manpage on my system. I looked at 'tar --help' for option explanation which didn't offer anything and I compared with linux tar behaviour. The linux version doesn't exhibit any pickiness about position of 'f' option when dash is being used. I do not have any experience with unix command line parsing but I wonder if the presence of this behaviour only when there is a dash indicates it has got something to do with getopt() or popt? I do not seem to have manpage for getopt() either even though it is references in popt manpage. In conclusion, is this a bug or a feature? PS I checked the package listing on http://cygwin.com, there is no man page with tar distribution. There is tar.texi in the source package. Maybe there should be manpage in the binary package. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
