R devel - Nov 2013 - tar binary in RTools 3.1.0.1939 has problems with tar.bz2 files

Hi,

With Rtools 3.1.0.1936 I can create and extract from .tar.bz2 files:

(first directory in %PATH% is c:\rtools31.1936\bin)

E:\>tar jcvf tmp.tar.bz2 tmp
tmp/
tmp/foo.txt

E:\>tar jtvf tmp.tar.bz2
drwxr-xr-x 4294967295/4294967295 0 2013-11-22 11:35 tmp/
-rw-r--r-- 4294967295/4294967295 3 2013-11-22 11:35 tmp/foo.txt

E:\>mkdir ex

E:\>cd ex

E:\ex>tar jxvf ..\tmp.tar.bz2
tmp/
tmp/foo.txt

E:\ex>cd ..

E:\>rm -rf ex

...but this fails when using the tar binary in Rtools 3.1.0.1939. The following
lines are run with c:\rtools31.1939 as the first directory in %PATH% (and there
is only one Rtools installation referenced in %PATH% in both these examples):

E:\>tar jcvf tmp.tar.bz2 tmp
tmp/
tmp/foo.txt

E:\>tar jtvf tmp.tar.bz2

E:\>mkdir ex

E:\>cd ex

E:\ex>tar jxvf ..\tmp.tar.bz2

E:\ex>ls

E:\ex>

Can this be fixed?
Thanks,
Dan

On 22/11/2013 2:51 PM, Dan Tenenbaum wrote:
> Hi,
>
> With Rtools 3.1.0.1936 I can create and extract from .tar.bz2 files:
>
> (first directory in %PATH% is c:\rtools31.1936\bin)
>
> E:\>tar jcvf tmp.tar.bz2 tmp
> tmp/
> tmp/foo.txt
>
> E:\>tar jtvf tmp.tar.bz2
> drwxr-xr-x 4294967295/4294967295 0 2013-11-22 11:35 tmp/
> -rw-r--r-- 4294967295/4294967295 3 2013-11-22 11:35 tmp/foo.txt
>
> E:\>mkdir ex
>
> E:\>cd ex
>
> E:\ex>tar jxvf ..\tmp.tar.bz2
> tmp/
> tmp/foo.txt
>
> E:\ex>cd ..
>
> E:\>rm -rf ex
>
> ...but this fails when using the tar binary in Rtools 3.1.0.1939. The
following lines are run with c:\rtools31.1939 as the first directory in %PATH%
(and there is only one Rtools installation referenced in %PATH% in both these
examples):
>
> E:\>tar jcvf tmp.tar.bz2 tmp
> tmp/
> tmp/foo.txt
>
> E:\>tar jtvf tmp.tar.bz2
>
> E:\>mkdir ex
>
> E:\>cd ex
>
> E:\ex>tar jxvf ..\tmp.tar.bz2
>
> E:\ex>ls
>
> E:\ex>
>
> Can this be fixed?
The tar.exe is identical in those two versions of Rtools, just the 
Cygwin DLLs (and a few other utilities) changed.  So I suspect this is 
something else, or perhaps a bug in the new Cygwin DLLs -- but the old 
Cygwin DLLs don't work on Win 8.1.

Some things you could try:

Just use the old Rtools.

Use the Cygwin tar.exe (available from Cygwin) instead of ours.  At the 
time we made our custom tar.exe, the Cygwin one would not support 
Windows drive specs, but perhaps the current one does.

Use something else, e.g. bzip to decompress, then tar to get from the tar.

Duncan Murdoch