POSIX, NFS, CPIO/TAR

[Chuck Karish]

From: karish at forel.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish)

In article <474 at longway.TIC.COM> Doug Gwyn <uunet!brl.mil!gwyn> wrote:
>From: Doug Gwyn <uunet!smoke.brl.mil!gwyn>
>In article <7674 at portia.Stanford.EDU> karish at forel.stanford.edu
(Chuck Karish) writes:
>>  [something stupid]

>IEEE Std 1003.1 defines "group ID" and "user ID" to be NON-NEGATIVE
>integers in Section 2.3.  This is in conformance with existing practice
>that Sun gratuitously ignored in their NFS implementation.

Hmmm.  This could, indeed, cause problems.

The original posting pointed out that that some vendors hedge on this
issue by making the types unsigned short, so the negative values are
cast to large (near USHRT_MAX) positive numbers.  Of course, this will
fail if a tar or cpio archive is unpacked on a system where uid_t and
gid_t are signed types longer than 16 bits, so 65534 != -2.

Who's going to change?  For that matter, will other 1003.1 semantics be
compromised to accomodate NFS as a transparent file access standard?
Stay tuned...

	Chuck Karish		karish at mindcraft.com
	(415) 323-9000		karish at forel.stanford.edu

Volume-Number: Volume 17, Number 105