-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

That's not how GNU tar behaves.

(Ok, so gnu tar is a lot smarter than standard tar. But standard tar, at least on Solaris, will expand absolute paths...)

Using gnu tar (on cygwin, although it shouldn't matter)

$ mkdir a
$ cd a
$ touch a_file
$ mkdir b
$ cd b
$ touch b_file
$ tar cvf /tmp/abc.tar b_file ../a_file
$ tar cvf /tmp/abc.tar b_file ../a_file
b_file
tar: Member names contain `..'
../a_file
$ tar tvf /tmp/abc.tar
-rw-r--r-- mike/mike      0 2002-04-03 06:48:08 b_file
-rw-r--r-- mike/mike      0 2002-04-03 06:48:02 ../a_file
$ rm b_file ../a_file
$ tar xvf /tmp/abc.tar
b_file
../a_file
tar: ../a_file: Member name contains `..'
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
$ ls . ..
.:
b_file

..:
b
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See? The file in .. was not extracted.

Wish I had time to download Archive::Tar to test what it would do, but I have to run to get to work.
--
Mike

I had the same error " member name contains `..' " when extracting an archive (and running it through gzip). # tar -zxvf my_tar_file.tar.gz The problem - I think - is that I created a tarball while being in some subdirectory. To cut the leading `\' from filenames I used the -P option. So the new cmd is: tar -zxvfP my_tar_file.tar.gz

I would expect Tar.pm to do the same (will test it when I get home).

One approach you might take is to have your program inspect the pathnames on component files of a tarball to see if absolute paths or "upward" references are used. Your program can then provide the logic to deal with these cases.

I'll see if I can provide an example of this.

---v

I get the auto stripping also...

But, you could do this type of evil...

[root@localhost root]# mkdir /foo.chroot /foo.chroot/lib
[root@localhost root]# ldd /bin/tar
        librt.so.1 => /lib/librt.so.1 (0x40027000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40039000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x40177000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
[root@localhost root]# (cd /lib && cp -p librt.so.1 libc.so.6 libpthre
+ad.so.0 ld-linux.so.2 /foo.chroot/lib)
[root@localhost root]# cp -p /bin/tar /foo.chroot
[root@localhost root]#
[root@localhost root]# cat >/etc/passwd.gotcha
gotcha!
^D
[root@localhost root]# tar cvf gotcha.tar /etc/passwd.gotcha
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
etc/passwd.gotcha
[root@localhost root]# man tar
...
[root@localhost root]# tar Pcvf gotcha.tar /etc/passwd.gotcha
/etc/passwd.gotcha
[root@localhost root]# tar tvf gotcha.tar
-rw-r--r-- root/root         8 2002-04-02 17:15:50 /etc/passwd.gotcha
[root@localhost root]# rm -f /etc/passwd.gotcha
[root@localhost root]# tar xvf gotcha.tar
/etc/passwd.gotcha
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
[root@localhost root]# ls ./etc/passwd.gotcha
./etc/passwd.gotcha
[root@localhost root]# rm ./etc/passwd.gotcha
[root@localhost root]# tar Pxvf gotcha.tar
/etc/passwd.gotcha
[root@localhost root]# ls /etc/passwd.gotcha
/etc/passwd.gotcha
[root@localhost root]# rm /etc/passwd.gotcha
[root@localhost root]# # ob. untested perl ;)
[root@localhost root]# perl -e 'print qx(cat gotcha.tar | chroot /foo.
+chroot ./tar Pxvf -)'
/etc/passwd.gotcha
[root@localhost root]# ls /etc/passwd.gotcha
ls: /etc/passwd.gotcha: No such file or directory
[root@localhost root]# ls /foo.chroot/etc/passwd.gotcha
/foo.chroot/etc/passwd.gotcha
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