using tar options without '-'

[genova]

My tape backup hung tonight - to the point that I cannot
kill the tar process, nor can I rmdev the tape device and
recreate it. I've gone through smitty, had the tech
physically remove the tape from the drive - all to no avail.
I will reboot the system in the early AM to remedy this

I'm told this happened because I executed tar options
without using "-" . I have always executed tar cvf ...
tar xvf ... etc. never incorporating a "-"
ie tar -cvf. Granted, this was on other flavors of Unix,
but I'm still having difficulty believing this
because this particular backup has run for quite some
time without errors or problems. Is this an AIX specific
issue ?? (And, yes - the AIX man page *does* show a hyphen
preceding each and every option). I guess my rationale
was that it should either work or not work, and not simply
decide to puke on May 7, 2002 shortly after copying 27,000
files to tape.

Can anyone verify this ??? Of course, I promise to
use "-"s in the future.

Thanks,
Joe

 

[KenCunningham]

I've seen this behaviour before and, whilst most newer incarnations of *nix will accept the options without the '-', older ones had a tendency not to. This is possibly even a default characteristic in some newer *nix' too, though I can't verify that. As you say, best advice is to use '-' every time. Best wishes.

 

[gheist]

this behavior is caused by a scsi command taking a long time - so you cannto force device closure nor kill a process while scsi device is busy (tar without "-" is a POSIX i think)