GNU tar 1-13 and unrecoverable errors

[Alicia Parker]

Hello all.  Thanks in advance for any and all help!  I'm fairly new at
UNIX, so please bear with me.

I am trying to create a multi-volume backup archive.  I needed GNU tar
in order to do so, so I downloaded it off of freeware.sgi.com.  It was
version 1-13. I installed it on my system with no errors.  However,
when I try to do the tar, it jumps right back with an error.

I am executing this command on an SGI Onyx running IRIX 6.5.8f.  The
tape drive I am writing to (in case anyone is interested) is an STK
Timberwolf 9730.  And I have no problems interfacing with it.

Here's my command:
/usr/freeware/bin/tar KMcvf /dev/rmt/tps2d1 *

(I'm explicitly delineating where the tar is because I don't want to
use the UNIX version of tar on the machine, and the star because I am
in the directory that I want to tar, and I want to include everything
within the directory).

It jumps back with the following error message:
/usr/freeware/bin/tar: Cannot open <directory within the current one>:
Is a directory
/usr/freeware/bin/tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Now I can tar/untar this same directory onto tape using the UNIX tar
without any problems whatsoever.  The command is exactly the same,
except the version of tar I am using is different.

Now my question is, is there some sort of bug with this version of
tar?  If so, is there a fix out there that I can download?  Or is it
something on my end?

And if this bug is not fixable (yet), where can I get a download
version 12 of gnu tar?

Again, thanks for any and all help!  Have a great afternoon!

Alicia
address@hidden