[csw-maintainers] off topic question about suntar

[Joerg Schilling]

Darin Perusich <Darin.Perusich at cognigencorp.com> wrote:

> I have an off topic question I'm hoping one of you Solaris hackers can
> help me answer. This might be right up Joerg alley since it's star guru ;-).
>
> I'm using suntar on Solaris 10 to create archives and I've run into an
> problem where when LANG is not set or set to a non-UTF-8 value like C,
> POSIX, etc, then 'suntar' will throw the message "tar: invalid character
> in UTF-8 conversion of 'luke???s.arf.gz'. There are a bunch of files that
> have funky names, I don't know who or why, and I get the same error for
> each one and they're not included in the archive.
>
> How does suntar know whether or not the file name is UTF-8 and why
> doesn't it even matter?

Did you use the -E option to suntar?

In this case and only in this case, the file names will be converted to UTF-8.

Note that we did add the permission to also have untranslated filenames to the 
POSIX standard around 2004 in order to allow tar to be used as backup format.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       js at cs.tu-berlin.de                (uni)  
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily