Kirk Strauser wrote:

In the amanda-2.4.4.tar.gz source tarball, I noticed that
client-src/sendbackup-gnutar.c has a hardcoded call to "gtar" (as opposed to
plain "tar").  This caused backup failures on my FreeBSD server until I
symlinked /usr/bin/tar -> /usr/bin/gtar.  I can't figure why that should be
the case.  Any thoughts?

You have the source tarball, and the after unpacking it
and reading the docs/INSTALL, you usually do:

  ./configure --prefix=... --with-gnutar=...   ...

If you leave out the --with-gnutar option, configure will look
itself for the gnutar command.

The reason it is built in, is because the client programs do not
need a configuration file.

A frequent trick is to compile with --with-gnutar=/usr/local/bin/amgtar.
And the "amgtar" command can be as simple as a symlink to the good
version of gnutar, or a shell script that creates a snapshot before
running gnutar, or shuts down databases etc.

--
Paul