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

[Philip N. <pr....@hc...>]

David Gressett wrote:
> 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.

Thanks, tried it and yes it works.

BUT:
mingw-get didn't supply the required libz-1.dll; I had to hunt that file 
down and d/ld + install manually from the sourceforge site.

Anyway, funny that gzip.exe, zip.exe and bzip2.exe can handle Windows 
file paths OOTB but that for tar one needs a not-very-appropriately 
named substitute ("not appropriately": bsd and Windows have little 
relation at first sight).

Philip