RFC: alias tar="tar --backup" ?

[Soren Hansen]

On Thu, May 17, 2007 at 06:03:18PM -0700, Micah Cowan wrote:
> > A completely different approach could be that the calls that
> > actually write to a file check that the file does not exist. You
> > could activate this with a system-wide flag, but I strongly suspect
> > that this would be more work than the few words it took for me to
> > write the idea.
> The call of which you speak (open()) already does this, unless you
> tell it that you specifically wish to overwrite files (which tar
> does).

That's not quite right.

Usually, you'll just pass the O_CREAT and O_TRUNC flags to open(2) in
order to just open the file (creating it if it doesn't exist already),
while you have to explicitly give it the O_EXCL flag to bail out if the
file already exists. Passing --backup to tar makes it check if it should
make a backup of the file, does so, and then proceeds to open the file
with (O_WRONLY | O_BINARY | O_CREAT | O_TRUNC) unless you pass it '-k',
in which case O_TRUNC is replaced with O_EXCL.

-- 
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