tar gives segfault

[Guglielmo Rabbiolo <rabbio@MATH.Purdue.EDU>]

hi,

this is a follow-up to my previous message:

> Just after having installed Debian 1.1.3 from buzz-fixed/1996_07_14
> I was
> using tar to copy debian packages on the disk, more precisely:
>
> tar -xvMf /dev/fd0
>
> (they are multi-volume files).
> Doing this I get "segmentation fault".
>
> I've tried with different volume sets (I've done one for each
> section, base, admin, devel .... etc) and I get inconsistent results. Some
> stops at the very first disk and some after that.
>
> Moreover dropping the -M or -v or both option (that of course
> results
> in a incomplete backup) works for the volume sets that stops at the
> first disk.
>

I've done more experiments. I created a multi-volume archive by using
tar -cvMf.  Then extracting the files with

tar -xMf 

gives: IOT trap/Abort (core dumped)
 
While extracting with tar -xvMf gives only segmentation fault.

What bothers me is that I've used tar before unpaching multi-volume
archives and worked fine. However I'm realizing now that before I was
creating the archive with tar 1.11.2 and unpacking with tar 1.11.8.
Right now I can reproduce the error with archives created with 1.11.8
and works fine with archives created with version 1.11.2.
 
Also I've used tar from slackware 3.0 without any problem and now I
guess it was not version 1.11.8.

Does anybody know what this IOT trap/Abort message is all about?
Is someone willing to repeat this simple experiment (create/extract)
to confirm (or not) that this is a bug with this version of tar?
Where do I get older versions of tar?

Lawrence Chim <ychim@yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au>, answering to my first
post wrote:

> you forgot to mount your floppy drive first

I don't quite understand this. I thought tar creates disks with raw
data on them, so how should I mount the floppy drive if there is no
filesystem built on it?
 
Thanks a lot for any help!!

-------------------------------------------
Guglielmo Rabbiolo (rabbio@math.purdue.edu)
Mathematics Department
Purdue University, W Lafayette IN
-------------------------------------------