Not a good start

kylev — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:01:55 +0000

This is going to be one of those days. I decided to install a python package called Plex that we use in a few places. It looked like a coworker was misusing it a little, so I wanted to understand more. I took a quick look at the tarball contents and was instantly annoyed.

[kylev@kylev-dt tmp]$ tar tzf Plex-1.1.5.tar.gz
[ Bunch of stuff scrolls off]
tests/._test6.py
tests/test6.py
tests/._test7.in
tests/test7.in
tests/._test7.out
tests/test7.out
tests/._test7.py
tests/test7.py
tests/._test8.in
tests/test8.in
tests/._test8.out
tests/test8.out
tests/._test8.py
tests/test8.py
tests/._test9.in
tests/test9.in
tests/._test9.out
tests/test9.out
tests/._test9.py
tests/test9.py

What jumps out at me is the damn ._ files everywhere. Crud, the author did this on a Mac, which in certain cases (and versions of tar) will include these annoying extra empty files. No big deal, it’s just annoying. Maybe I’ll talk to the maintainer later and have him fix it.

Let’s get on with it and get this baby installed:

[kylev@kylev-dt tmp]$ tar xzf Plex-1.1.5.tar.gz
[kylev@kylev-dt tmp]$ cd Plex-1.1.5.tar.gz

Wait, what the hell? Why did tab-completion give me the tarball again? Oh, damnit! While being distracted and annoyed with the OSX dot-underscore files, I failed to notice that this tarball doesn’t have a top level container directory! Argh, it has just spewed files all over instead of being neatly contained. No big deal, I’m in my ~/tmp directory so I probably didn’t over-write anything important. Time to clean things up:

[kylev@kylev-dt tmp]$ tar tzf Plex-1.1.5.tar.gz | xargs rm
rm: cannot remove `./._Iconr': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Iconr': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove `Plex/': Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `doc/': Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `examples/': Is a directory
rm: cannot remove `tests/': Is a directory

Bah, I could have used rm -rf, but I didn’t want to trash the whole examples or doc directories in case I had one not created by this package. Let’s just clean up the last bits one by one.

[kylev@kylev-dt tmp]$ rmdir ._Icon^M

What did tab-completion just do with… facepalm! The tarball contained a directory with a carriage-return in the name! Time to fire up emacs dired to finish cleaning up.

That was one troublesome tarball. It can only get better from here, right?

Geek at Play » tar

Not a good start