Bug in gnu tar?

[Stephen Hooper]

Hi,

I think I have found a bug in GNU tar version 1.13 which impacts remote
archive operations on some machines.

In rtapelib.c, lines 417-418 are causing a problem on HP/UX machines
which breaks the call to remsh (HP/UX rsh).  Because line 418 increments
the pointer to remote_shell_basename by one, the second argument in the
subsequent call to execl is "emsh"  I don't know why, but this is
interpreted by HP/UX's remsh as the hostname:

rcmd: emsh: Unknown host

I don't think there is any point to that line anyway, as your base_name
function is not returning a beginning slash.  Here is a diff of what
fixed the problem for me:

416d415
< 
418,419c417,419
< 
<     if (!remote_shell_basename);
---
>     if (remote_shell_basename)
>       remote_shell_basename++;
>     else
456d455
< 

-- 
Stephen Hooper
Sr. Systems Programmer
University of Arizona - Computer Operations
(520) 626-2917