Re: I am so sad.

[Vince Eccles]

I have advised UNIX developers in the past on catching stupid things people do. I do stupid things from time to time.  I was a tester for a number of the old Digital Corporation OS developments. For example, they put some simple catches in compilers to disallow certain command requests. 

You don't have to do anything, but I just thought you might like to know and think about a warning when -f is used and a file name is not consistent with tarball names. 

May you never do stupid things,

Vince

On Thu, Aug 20, 2020 at 12:03 AM Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:

On Wed, 2020-08-19 at 21:05 -0600, Vince Eccles wrote:
> Dear sirs,
>
> I worked all day on debugging some important coding in FORTRAN. It was
> tested and working. I decided it was time to tar up the new code and send
> it to a backup machine.
>
> I intended to type:
>
> tar -zcf src.tar.gz ./various_*/*.f90 *.f90
>
> which would have places all the fortran codes in a compressed tar file that
> I would transfer to a new machine.
>
> However, I typed:
>
> tar -zcf ./various_/*.f90 *.f90
>
> and the tar blasted all of my fortran files. I had a backup from two days
> ago, but the lost effort was horrific.
>
> There needs to be a test to make sure stupid things don't happen.
>

How is it supposed to know that someone's doing something stupid?
 Pattern expansion is done by shell, not tar.  If you want to be safer,
don't use '-f' and instead redirect stdout.

  tar -zc ./various_/*.f90 *.f90 > src.tar.gz

--
Best regards,
Michał Górny