me: why did this customer send a tar? not that I can't get it open, but, please just use zip like a normal person
(I open the tar)
(inside is a zip)
@0xabad1dea Not even a .tar.gz, that'd be basically the opposite. Oh no, this is a Special kind of silly.
@0xabad1dea Maybe the mail filter removes zip attachments...? At my company a common workaround was to rename zip files to zipp.
@0xabad1dea Inside is an ARJ file (did I just age myself?)?
@0xabad1dea Maybe to get around a stupid mail filter?
@0xabad1dea And inside that zip is a word document. And inside that word document are copied and pasted images.
It's like a Matryoshka doll of suck and misunderstanding.
@0xabad1dea hey, at least it’s not a zip file in a PowerPoint presentation.
@0xabad1dea reminding me of the xml api that sent responses that began with <xml><![CDATA[ and then had escaped xml, before a final ]]></xml>
our best guess? the inner xml didn't quite validate against the schema provided, so it looked like a workaround
@0xabad1dea Ok, but sending doc files should be illegal.
@0xabad1dea still better than sending a .rar :D
@0xabad1dea The real answer is probably that their email sender rejected the contents of the zip, but doesn't know how to look inside a tar. This always used to be a problem for me since our email system at work wouldn't allow JS files as attachments (even inside of zip files) and I develop websites.
@0xabad1dea I'm no Linux expert but... Don't they usually go the other way around?
@0xabad1dea
I don't know why I can't remember half my life but remember -xvf when I haven't used it in 15 years. 🌿
@0xabad1dea made me go from sleepy to O.O real quick
@0xabad1dea amazing how many of these can unexpectedly be opened by Windows these days.
@0xabad1dea I wonder if the reason I still often see, for instance, release versions packaged as foobar.zip for Windows and foobar.tar.gz for Linux is just so they have different filenames.
@0xabad1dea Someone should make a wrapper named "bacon"
@0xabad1dea It is *conceivable* that the sender has had experience with zip attachments being blocked by overzealous (and dumb) email systems in the past. But that's kind of a stretch.
@0xabad1dea Customers 🤝🏻 Bad Actors: Nested archives
(because neither knows what they're doing until one accidentally discovers yet another dir traversal vuln or MotW bypass)
@0xabad1dea Everyone knows you need the tar to stick the zip together.
@0xabad1dea FWIW I still prefer tar to zip since you can recover a partial tar, but a partial zip is unusable.
@0xabad1dea What was in the zip? A .iso? with a .7z? of a .jar?
This could be fun....
@0xabad1dea A client of mine distributes their Unix components the other way around - as a zip file containing a tar file. I have never been able to get to the bottom of this mystery...
@baljemmett @0xabad1dea Oh, that's easy. The zip file is standard and everybody uses it, so that's what gets sent out. But if you put Unix stuff in a zip the permissions get messed up, so you tar it first.
@RogerBW @0xabad1dea Yes, that's about what I came up with too. The odd thing is that going back through the history earlier attempts were .tar.gz and later .tar.Z, presumably because some of the target platforms didn't ship with gunzip but decompress was everywhere, but then those same platforms wouldn't have shipped with unzip either! I suppose you could unzip on another machine and then move the tar file over easily enough...
(Mainly I just wish some of these decisions had been documented!)
@baljemmett @RogerBW there’s a very real chance that either a web server or a client side plugin got upset about fake mystery extensions you just made up, but believes zip is real
@klausfiend when was the last time you had a partial anything
@0xabad1dea lol old habits die hard? When I was still working in studios, incomplete zip files were a routine occurrence, and most offline editors had no idea what "tar" was.
@jon one time I couldn't find the documentation PDFs that the customer claimed they sent. They were all embedded in the last page of a superficial introductory powerpoint. They were baffled I didn't think to look there.
@wheeljack @foremostarchwiz it just hit me like a truck that the nineties-ness of this image isn't an affectation, it was just actually the nineties back in the nineties
