Zlib: path name cannot be split into prefix and name

[Alexandru]

I get this error from zlib while I'm compressing some files into a an archive:

path name cannot be split into prefix and name
while executing
"formatHeader $name [statFile $in $followlinks]"
(procedure "writefile" line 2)
invoked from within
"writefile $x $fh $dereference $x"
(procedure "tar::create" line 13)
invoked from within
"tar::create $fd $paths -chan"

Any idea what could cause this? I don't think the error has anything to do with the Tcl command "file split".

The file names and paths look normal to me and the function worked fine until now.

Many thanks
Alexandru

[Alexandru]

I think the issue are files with long file names. I have a few with a full path of 271 chars and the file name is 152 chars long.
Is there a limitation regarding the length of the file path length in zlib?

[Rich]

No, zlib does not know anything about filenames. zlib only compresses
a blob of data.

Your error is from the tar module, and given the length you state
above, you might just be exceeding the max length for a filename in the
header for the tar variant that the tcllib tar module generates. Which
makes the error message a bit confusing.

[Alexandru]

Thanks, Rich, indeed, it's the tar module.
How this be avoided in an application, that runs in Windows and where the file paths can be longer?

[Rich]

Update the tar module to generate tar files in one of the extension
versions that allow for unlimited length filenames, and contribute the
updates back to Tcllib.

Although that is not likely the answer you were looking for.