tar problems with SCO

[Mark Seiffert]

I am having a problem with SCO's tar program. i wonder if others have
had the same problem, and what they did.

I have two 337MB hard drives on a 286 clone running SCO Xenix 286 rel 2.2.1.
SCO only supports less than 65500 inodes so i have partitioned one drive
with a seperate partition for /usr/spool/. I did not want to expire news
that often, so some of my spool/news directories became quite large. The
most notable two being comp/sys/ibm/pc and comp/sys/amiga. When i try to
tar these two directories or the entire /usr/spool/ partition, tar will
start backing up the large directory repeatedly. If the tar file is a 
regular file, it will stop when the disk is full, if the tar is to a 
tape, i guess it would go forever, I stopped it at 5 60MB tapes. I talked
to the ever so knowledgable barbh at SCO and she says SCO is aware of the
of the problem, and they have fixed, and it will be released with release
3.2.4 of Xenix 286. Since this 2.2.2 seems to be current for the 286 
version, i would take a guess and say that 3.2.4 is just a little ways
off still. Has anyone had this problem with SCO's tar? Is there another
version of tar out there similiar to SCO's that does not had this bug?
is it worth paying $600+ to the vendor so i can get this type of support?



Joke of the month:
Instant Mainframe. Just Add SCO. (SCO advertisement)


-- 
Mark Seiffert,  Metairie, LA.
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