Re: [Bug-tar] Strange Extra Line in 1.14 and 1.15.1's -tvf Output.

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Sergey,

> Ralph Corderoy <address@hidden> wrote:
> > An extra line of output, including some NUL bytes, appears in the
> > output of `tar -tvf'.
> 
> When used with -g or -G, -t option historically implies displaying
> some internal data from GNU tar headers. That is exactly extra lines
> you are complaining about.

Yes, I found the bit of the source after my email.

> In my opinion it should be displayed only when -v (or even -vv is
> given), I will fix this in the next release.

It seems like debug code left in place.  The characters aren't escaped
to be visible, e.g. the NULs in the output.  Leaving the listing
scrolling up the screen I find there must be escape codes in there that
cause a switch of character set since only digits remain after a while
with everything else being line-drawing characters.

-t and -tv output format is well-known so I don't think the fact that
this happens to be a -g tar file should cause this non-escaped,
non-formatted output to be interleaved with the -t/-tv lines.  -tvv may
be good enough to display them, but only then if they're escaped and
better formatted to be readable.  Otherwise a --debug-listed-incremental
may be a better idea to make clear it's intended for developers and not
users.

Cheers,


Ralph.