Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 63671
pax does not support long file names
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:42:04 EDT
Description of Problem: According to pax(1) manpage it should support pathnames of 100 characters in length in tar mode and 250 in ustar mode. Actually it supports only pathnames with maximum of 99 characters in length in both modes. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): pax-3.0-1 How Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create file with name that has 100 or greater characters in length 2. pax -wv -x tar -f test1.tar filename 3. pax -wv -x ustar -f test2.tar filename Actual Results: File name too long Expected Results: It should either add it to tar successfully or documentation should be corrected (which I doubt) Additional Information: GNU tar successfully added file with name as long as 255 characters (on ext3 filesystem)
you can use filename with up to 99 chars (+ the trailing \0 in strings) pathnames (directory name + filename) can have up to 250 chars. I've fixed the manpage to make that more obvious
You mean it's a standard behaviour? Ok, then. But that makes it incompatible with GNU tar. I've got an impression that it could be a universal substitute for tar and cpio and started to use it everywhere. Well, back to the tar then. <Sigh> May I suggest to make this incompatibility clear too?