oo
Turns out, it's pretty important if you use PAX for backup. In the man
page for PAX, there is an error (OK, we could call it a "potentially
catastrophic incompleteness"). It reads:
> The command:
>
> pax -r -v -f filename
>
> gives the verbose table of contents for an archive stored in filename.
Yup, it does do that. With a side effect: it also _replaces_ all the
files that come in from the archive. As is my custom, I did my
backup-validation real soon after the backup was written. Precisely
because I've seen the same sort of thing happen on other systems. So all
that file-restoring didn't do a lot of damage. Probably helped my
fragmentation somewhat (aha, an online defragger?) It did confuse one
hapless user, who lost an email message he _knew_ he hadn't deleted.
Apparently the system restored the file as of just before that critical
message came in.
The correct entry should read:
> The command:
>
> pax -v -f filename
>
> gives the verbose table of contents for an archive stored in filename.
Submitted by: John Beckett <jbeckett@southern.edu> via the BSDI mailing list
cpio/copyout.c:
Don't output a file if the major, minor or totality of its rdev would be
truncated. Print a message about the skipped files to stderr but don't
report the error in the exit status. cpio's abysmal error handling doesn't
allow continuing after an error, and the rdev checks had to be misplaced
to avoid the problem of returning an error code from routines that return
void.
pax/pax.h:
Use the system macros for major(), minor() and makedev().
pax already checks _all_ output conversions for overflow. This has the
undesirable effect that failure to convert relatively useless fields
such as st_dev for regular files causes files not to be output. pax
doesn't report exactly which fields couldn't be converted.
tar/create.c:
Don't output a file if the major or minor its rdev would be truncated.
Print a message about the skipped files to stderr and report the error
in the exit status.
tar/tar.c:
For not immediately fatal errors, exit with status 1, not the error count
(mod 256).
All:
Minor numbers are limited to 21 bits in pax's ustar format and to 18
bits in archives created by gnu tar (gnu tar wastes 3 bits for padding).
pax's and cpio's ustar format is incompatible with gnu tar's ustar
format for other reasons (see cpio/README).
/usr/src/bin. Note that some patches are still needed in that directory.
I (Joerg) finished most of Philippe's cleanup. /bin/sh will still
need *allot* of work, however.
Submitted by: charnier@lirmm.fr (Philippe Charnier)
