More control with --info-script option

[Russ Trotter]

Hello,

   I've been looking at extending the --info-script option to allow a
script to return an exit status code that would indicate whether the tar
should continue or abort (e.g. a programmatic version of the default
user prompts when no info-script is specified). After looking through
buffer.c in the GNU tar 1.13 dist, I noticed that the call to the
info-script is through the system(3) library call.  What about replacing
this with a execl()/wait() combo then testing the return code?

  Due to the beauty of GPL, I've modified a local copy of the source at
my site and can use that binary locally, but what about rolling this
feature into the standard dist?

  Just to give you more insight, I want to use the info-script option to
specify a script that will change tapes in our tape library autoloader.
However, if errors occur or no more tapes are available i want to abort
the tar.

thanks for the time!
russ
address@hidden