Re: [Help-bash] bash 4.3 escaping : (breaking script), unlike 4.2. Huh?

[Eduardo Bustamante]

OK, so the assumption here is that your interactive shell is Bash.
Nothing has changed in bash that would cause the escaping that you're
seeing. Bash passes the arguments unmodified to GNU tar (another
assumption is that you're running system's tar, which in Ubuntu 14.04
is GNU tar 1.27.1-1 [1]).

Reading through the commit logs in GNU tar code repository, you can
find the following commit:

    hp% PAGER=cat git show 61cd3f
    commit 61cd3fd26855d40ee3a6491b2aa3611cd2aae46c
    Author: Sergey Poznyakoff <address@hidden>
    Date:   Thu Apr 14 11:51:38 2016 +0300

        Fix argument handling when running external commands.

        * src/system.c (xexec): Use sh -c to run the command.  This fixed
        bug introduced by 7b5e80396 (tar 1.27)
        * doc/tar.texi: Fix checkpoint examples: (1) $TAR_FILENAME
        is not available when creating archive and (2) --checkpoint
        can't be used as abbreviation of --checkpoint-action
    [...]

If you inspect the patch for src/system.c [2], you'll realize that
this was fixed after version 1.27. I'm not sure what the best option
is here, but you need to upgrade your tar command.

More links to read:

- Re: [Bug-tar] How one can do untar a file and gzip
its files with one command line?
http://osdir.com/ml/bug-tar-gnu/2016-04/msg00011.html


[1] http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/tar
[2] 
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/commit/?id=61cd3fd26855d40ee3a6491b2aa3611cd2aae46c