tar -f behaviour

[Eugene Rosenzweig]

Looking at tar I noticed a small oddity in its behaviour, as compared to
what I would have thought was 'normal'
When dealing with files, using dash before options, the 'f' option has to be
the last one in the option string, e.g.
tar -tfz tarball.tar.gz
works while
tar -ftz tarball.tar.gz
doesn't reporting that file 'tz' does not exist.
It seems that 'f' anything after the 'f' option is considered to be the
archive filename.
tar -f tarball.tar.gz -tz
works.
When dash is absent the oddity is absent too,
tar ftz tarball.tar.gz
works with options f, t and z in any combination whatsoever.

There is no tar manpage on my system. I looked at 'tar --help' for option
explanation which didn't offer anything and I compared with linux tar
behaviour. The linux version doesn't exhibit any pickiness about position of
'f' option when dash is being used. I do not have any experience with unix
command line parsing but I wonder if the presence of this behaviour only
when there is a dash indicates it has got something to do with getopt() or
popt? I do not seem to have manpage for getopt() either even though it is
references in popt manpage.

In conclusion, is this a bug or a feature?


PS I checked the package listing on http://cygwin.com, there is no man page
with tar distribution. There is tar.texi in the source package. Maybe there
should be manpage in the binary package.


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