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  3. AR# 11162: CORE Generator - Problems with installing IP Updates using "tar" and GNU "tar" due to long path names

AR# 11162

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CORE Generator - Problems with installing IP Updates using "tar" and GNU "tar" due to long path names

Description


General Description:

Users are experiencing problems installing IP Updates using "tar" and GNU "tar."

Solution


1. Problems with versions of Solaris tar earlier have been reported earlier

than February 1998; however, this is unlikely to be an issue for users

running on Solaris 2.6 and later.



2. There is a general problem with tar's handling of path names that are longer

than 100 characters. The POSIX standard generally does not allow for path

names that exceed this length. (There is a rider that if the path happens to have

a "/'in the 156th character position, path names up to 256 characters are allowed;

however, this is not of much use in practice!). There are several files in the IP

Update #3 archive with fully-qualified path names that exceed this limit.



While Solaris tar and GNU tar both extend the POSIX standard to cope with

longer path names, they do not do it in the same way. The consequence of this

is that archives created with one tool will not extract correctly with the other.

Particularly, when GNU tar tries to extract a file with a fully-qualified path name

from an archive created by Solaris tar, it discards the directory information and

puts it at the top level of the target extraction directory. WinZip appears to do

the same thing with Solaris tar archives.



3. Solaris tar has problems with checksum calculations for archives if any file

name includes a non-ASCII character (i.e., a character with a numeric value

greater than 127).



The following symptoms have been observed when trying to extract a

Solaris tar.gz archive:



- When extracted with WinZip, a numerical suffix is added to the end of the

filename extension. For example, "<filename>.class" becomes something

like "<filename>.class0100775".



- with GNU tar, the last character of the filename extension is dropped,

so you get a file named"<filename>.clas" instead of "<filename>.class".





The solution is to use the appropriate tool with the correct archive:



-- .ZIP: The Zip file can be unpacked using WinZip7.0 SR-1

or later on Windows. On Unix, some versions of unzip may be used to unpack a

Zip file, but there are some known issues with this, as are described in

(Xilinx Solution 7711).



-- .TAR.GZ: On UNIX platforms, we recommend that you download

the ".tar.gz" file and unpack it using the UNIX command line utilities gunzip

and tar (not GNU tar). Note that the date stamp of the "/user/sbin/tar"

command must be February 10, 1998 or later. This version of tar is usually supplied

with Solaris operating system versions 2.6 or later. WinZip and "GNU tar" are not

recommended, due to the problems regarding long path names.



-- .GNUTAR.GZ: The "gnutar.gz" archive can be extracted using the UNIX

"gunzip" utility and the GNU version of "tar."
AR# 11162
Date 07/28/2010
Status Archive
Type General Article
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