Version of TAR in tarfile module? TAR 1.14 or 1.15 port to Windows?

[Claudio Grondi]

Martin, thank you for your response.

I see, that I have to test myself if the tarfile
module can do what I need, so I did and I
have evidence, that the Python tarfile module
is not able to see all the files inside the TAR
archives created on Linux with TAR 1.14 .
The Python tarfile module stops to go through the
TAR archive somewhere already at the beginning,
like the other tools I have used, did.

I have no understanding what Cygwin, MinGW
(do I put MinGW in the right context?) are and do,
but I gave Cygwin a try and installed it selecting
also the tar package version 1.15 for installation.

I tried to run the tar.exe, but in the beginning it was
not able to do anything for me. I haven't given up
and after hours of trying to find the reason for this
I found that:
  the tar.exe seems to have no access to any files
  not inside the
   [%SystemDrive%\Cygwin\usr]
 directory on my system drive e: , where Cygwin is
 installed.
Is there a way to go around this, because I have
to uncompress a 17 GByte file and my system
drive has only 3 GByte of free storage space.
I have in mind, that it could have something to do
with the mount command, but this is all I can
remember. I work in a Windows command shell
(DOS-box) and mount says:
j: on /cygdrive/j , but I don't know how to write
the entire path
"j:\o\archives\images\dump.tar",
so that the file can be found by tar.exe and
unpacked to "i:\images" .
tar.exe --extract --directory=tmp -f j:/o/archives/images/dump.tar
results in:
/usr/bin/tar: j\:/o/archives/images/dump.tar: Cannot open: Input/Output
error
telling
tar.exe --extract --directory=tmp -f /cygdrive/j/o/archives/images/dump.tar
doesn't work either.

Claudio

"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:4306cf8d$0$15269$9b622d9e at news.freenet.de...
> Claudio Grondi wrote:
> > What TAR version is built into the tarfile module?
>
> None: the tarfile module is not built on top of
> GNU tar. Instead, it is a complete reimplementation.
>
> > Is there a TAR 1.14 or 1.15 port to Windows
> > available in Internet for download (which URL)?
>
> http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/
>
> Regards,
> Martin