Re: [Mingw-users] tar doesn't accept Windows-style path names with drive letters?

[David G. <DGr...@am...>]

Philip Nienhuis wrote:
>Hi,

>In the course of fixing a bug for Octave on Windows (www.octave.org) I 
>hit the following issue:

>The msys tar.exe executable doesn't accept Windows style file names a la
>'C:\full\path\to\file.fil'
>or even
>'C:/full/path/to/file.fil'
>but insists on
>'/c/full/path/to/file.fil'.
>The other archivers zip/unzip, bzip2 and gzip happily accept path names 
>with drive letters.

>My tar version:

>$ tar --version
>tar (GNU tar) 1.23
>Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

>Am I doing something wrong, or is this a bug?

>Thanks,

>Philip

It's not a bug. Any msys utilities that understand Windows file name
syntax just have   extra frills that give them an ability to do something that msys 
will not ask them to do.

You need a tar that works on the MinGW side, where ability to handle Windows 
filename syntax is needed and used, and there is in fact such a creature, which
can be easily installed with the MinGW installer. Start it and look for

mingw32-bsdtar

in the Packages column. Make sure that you have "All Packages" highlighted in 
the package category box at the left side of the installer.