5.3-RC2 tar breaks operation with "(null)"

[Andrew Sinclair]

Hi everybodi!

    At work I use a Windows eXPensive machine to gather information and 
maintain the web site. I needed to bring some files home and I didn't 
have time to setup a proper archiver, so I used cygnus tar to pack them 
uncompressed.
    I burned this tar dump onto a CD-RW. I didn't just pack everything 
into Nero and let the Toliet^WJoliet file system take care of it because 
neither Joliet or Rock Ridge allow files to use the same name even if 
they are in different paths. Besides, there are file name size 
limitations... I have not even started yet. don't make me.
    I'm using the new tar from 5.3-RC2 to read from the mounted CD-RW. 
It seems to have a problem with null blocks, halfway through the archive 
in my case. I got this in the output:

bash-2.05b$ tar -xvf /dvdrom/20041116.tgz
...
x Ocean Care Day/OCD website/Website/OCD Photos/mec cam 
pictures/000_0075.jpg
x Ocean Care Day/OCD website/Website/OCD Photos/mec cam pictures/Thumbs.db
x Ocean Care Day/OCD website/Website/OCD Photos/Presentation.ppt: (null)
tar: (null)
bash-2.05b$

    I remembered that tar uses four blocks of 0x00 to indicate the end 
of an archive on a sequential device, such as a tape, so I searched the 
man page for an option to bypass it. No luck. Of all the problems people 
have with defacto standard optical media, I had to run into a software 
issue :-\

    I might be able to get around it with another tar but surely the one 
included should be able to work around this. Any ideas?

    - syncman0x