Re: What is the minimum needed to run gtar?

[David Rothenberger <daveroth at acm dot org>]

"Biederman, Steve" wrote:
> 
> I want to allow the users I support to be able to run Cygwin tar on their Windows machines.
> These machines have not had any Cygwin installed; they're just bare Windows machines.
> 
> I provided them tar.exe and cygwin1.dll and assumed that with these, they could run
> Cygwin tar sucessfully.  It appears that that isn't the case: machines without Cygwin
> installed see different behavior than machines which have it installed.  (Running tar
> on machines without Cygwin installed creates incorrect tar archives.)

You can find out what DLLs an executable needs by running cygcheck on
it.  On my machine, I get

$ cygcheck tar
Found: .\tar.exe
tar.exe
  C:\WINNT\system32\KERNEL32.dll
    C:\WINNT\system32\NTDLL.DLL
  .\cygwin1.dll
  .\cygiconv-2.dll
  .\cygintl-2.dll
 
> What is the minimum I need to provide to a non-Cygwin Windows machine to get
> Cygwin tar to run reliably?

I was able to reproduce your problems with tar when I removed Cygwin
from my machine (which is why the paths are weird in the cygcheck output
above).

Through experimentation, I discovered that the problem went away if I
created an /etc mount.  From a Windows CLI prompt:

  mkdir c:\temp\etc
  mount c:/temp/etc /etc

After I run those commands, I can make the tar file without problems. 
Note that there is nothing in the /etc directory.  But, it does have to
exist.  If you skip the "mkdir" command above, it will fail as before.

Dave

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