help! tar archive paradox

[Rahul Dhesi]

I wanted to make a tar archive that contains all tar archives that do
not contain themselves.

Richard Sutton writes:

     But what will contain the tar archive that contains all tar
     archives that do not contain themselves? Therein lies the
     paradox!

I got quite a bit of email about my original query.  Some guy mentioned
a Barber in Seville who shaves people instead of cutting their hair.
(I think this is an opera or something.  Personally, I prefer a good
symphony, because opera singers waver their voices so much.  Anyway, I
doubt that any opera would be about tar archives.)

Also one guy said that his 64-character screen was too small so he
couldn't answer the question in the margin.  I kind of think he was
making fun of me, because everybody is using machines these days with
large screens.  (You should see some of the tiny fonts people use
around here on their Sun workstations -- they can fit 200 or more
characters on a line, and I can barely read them.  And to think that
just a few years ago we were all using VIC-20s with 22-character
screens!  Technology has really come a long way.  Although, as my
question shows, they haven't gotten all the glitches out of tar archive
handling.)

Anyway, this is Usenet, and I'm used to somebody posting a perfectly
innocent question and getting lots of flippant answers.  So, in
response to Richard's question which I quoted above, I know exactly
where to put the tar archive!  I was thinking of buying a CD-ROM
drive.  (You can buy these real cheap from DAK, though I don't know
about the quality.)  They can hold a lot of data these days.  500-600 M
today, I'm sure gigabytes in the future.  Also, pretty soon you will be
able to record on these things.

By the way, I tried the -russell option to tar, and the program just
complained.  I'm using tar on a Sun, so maybe I need to use gnu tar or
something.

Actually I was trying to compile a public domain tar, and I saw a
source file that tried to #include all files that didn't include
themselves, through some real complicated set of macros.  The C
compiler gave a fatal error at that point.  Maybe I need to see if gcc
can handle the code.  If I can get that free tar compiled, it might do
what I need, or maybe I could modify it to do it.

Thanks to all for the comments.  I'll keep on trying to get tar to do
what I want.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <dhesi at cirrus.COM>
UUCP:  oliveb!cirrusl!dhesi