bsdtar --gname switch

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Mon, 17 Oct 2011, Romain Garbage wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Following previous advice from questions@, I filed a PR for this
> (bin/161749) and I'm forwarding the previous mail to this list:
>
> According to bsdtar(1) manpage, tar has a --gname switch that permits
> to set an arbitrary groupname in the tar archive, but:
> $ tar -cf foo.tar --gname root bar
> tar: Option --gname is not supported
> Usage:
>  List:    tar -tf <archive-filename>
>  Extract: tar -xf <archive-filename>
>  Create:  tar -cf <archive-filename> [filenames...]
>  Help:    tar --help
>
> I get the same error for --uname and --gid switches. I'm running
> 9.0-BETA3 (r226421). Does this have any chances to be corrected in a
> not to far away future?

This is, at present, a documentation bug.
FreeBSD svn revision 207786 was "Various manpage updates, including many 
long-option synonyms that were previously undocumented", which added the 
gname long-format option to bsdtar.1.  However, this option is not present 
in usr.bin/tar/cmdline.c in FreeBSD head, though it was added in r2349 of 
upstream libarchive sources on May 1, 2010.  So, it looks like it should 
have been in libarchive since 2.8.4; however, pulling tarballs for 2.8.4 
and 2.8.5 it does not seem that gname is listed in cmdline.c for either of 
them.

I'm not familiar with the libarchive release process; Tim, can you shed 
some insight on what happened here?

Thanks,

Ben Kaduk