[TUHS] Old tar bug in SVR4.2 was: SYSTEM V R1 HELP

[Arthur Krewat]

Somewhat tangentially related to the other thread...

So, back in the days when I was using Consensys SVR4.2, I found a bug in 
tar. It goes like this:

If there is a symbolic link in the tree that you are taring, the first 
one works fine. If a second symbolic link has a shorter destination name 
than the first, the extra characters from the first symbolic link 
destination are appended to the end of the second. So for example:

a -> abcdef
b -> zyx

Tar will actually tar these symbolic links as:

a -> abcdef
b -> zyxdef

Being that I happen to have found, on the Internet, the sources to AT&T 
SVR4.2, and some other System V variants, I went and investigated.

The relevant piece from AT&T SVR4.2 tar.c (broken):

Jan 25  1993 ./ATT/ATT-SYSVr4/cmd/tar/tar.c

         case S_IFLNK:
                 <SNIP>
                 i = readlink(shortname, filetmp, NAMSIZ - 1);
                 if (i < 0) {
                         vperror(0, "can't read symbolic link %s", 
longname);
                         return;
                 }

 From USL-4.2 (apparently fixed):

Jan 22  1994 ./USL/usl-4.2-source/src/i386/cmd/tar/tar.c

         case S_IFLNK:
                 <SNIP>
                 i = readlink(shortname, filetmp, NAMSIZ - 1);
                 if (i < 0) {
                         vperror(0, ":462:Cannot read symbolic link %s", 
longname);
                         return;
                 }
                 else
                         filetmp[i] = '\0';   /* since readlink does not 
supply a '\0' */

 From Solaris 2.5:

         case S_IFLNK:
                 <SNIP>
                 i = readlink(shortname, filetmp, NAMSIZ - 1);
                 if (i < 0) {
                         vperror(0, gettext(
                         "can't read symbolic link %s"), longname);
                         if (aclp != NULL)
                                 free(aclp);
                         return;
                 } else {
                         filetmp[i] = 0;
                 }



BSD 4.4:

         case S_IFLNK:
                 <SNIP>
                 i = readlink(shortname, dblock.dbuf.linkname, NAMSIZ - 1);
                 if (i < 0) {
                         fprintf(stderr,
                             "tar: can't read symbolic link %s: %s\n",
                             longname, strerror(errno));
                         return;
                 }
                 dblock.dbuf.linkname[i] = '\0';


Anyone know when/why/how tar diverged between the two branches? Note the 
readlink directly into dblock.dbuf, while the SVR4 variants use a temp 
string and then sprintf it in later.

From: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/usl-bugs.txt

17. tar(1) fails to restore adjacent symbolic links properly
   Arthur Krewatt <...!rutgers!mcdhup!kilowatt!krewat> reports:
   SVR4 tar has another strange bug. Seems if when restoring files, you
restore one file that is a link, say "a ->/a/b/c/d/e" and there is another
link just after it called "b ->/a/b/c" tar will restore it as "b ->/a/b/c/d/e"
This just seems to be a lack of the NULL at the end of the string, like
someone did a memmov or memcpy(dest,src,strlen(src)); where it should be
strlen(src)+1 to include the NULL.
    Esix cannot reproduce this under 4.0.4 or 4.0.4.1, they think it's fixed.