gitlab-ci-multi-runner fails to create cache or artifacts archives with error message: Cannot stat: No such file or directory

I am using gitlab-ci-multi-runner on windows. Currently I am trying to use caching and artifacts for my builds.

Both options fail with multiple error messages like tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net20\\NLog.dll: Cannot stat: No such file or directory

I tribble checked that these files exist and are accessible to the multi runner process. The odd thing is: This does only happen for some files and a partial archive is created in c:\Multi-Runner\cache\<group>\<project>\build\master

From the source of bash.go I figured out that eventually a call to multi runner is made, so I executed the same call from a bash in the source directory

$ /c/Multi-Runner/gitlab-ci-multi-runner.exe archive --output artifacts.tgz --path packages

?[34mINFO?[0m[0000] Creating archive artifacts.tgz ...
packages/
packages\\NLog.2.1.0/
packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\NLog.2.1.0.nupkg
packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib/
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net20: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net20\\NLog.dll: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net20\\NLog.xml: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net35: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net35\\NLog.dll: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net35\\NLog.xml: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net40: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net40\\NLog.dll: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net40\\NLog.xml: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net45: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net45\\NLog.dll: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
tar: packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net45\\NLog.xml: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\\sl2/
packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\\sl2\\NLog.dll
packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\\sl2\\NLog.xml
...

You may notice that the some files (packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\NLog.2.1.0.nupkg and packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\\sl2\\NLog.dll|xml) can be tared while others (packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net20\\NLog.xml) can't.

Running a simple

tar cvfz artifacts.tgz packages/

runs without errors and all files are inside the archive. Please can someone explain why this happens for multi-runner?

I am currently using gitlab-ci-multi-runner.exe version 0.7.2 (998cf5d)

Directly after posting the issue, I figured out what's going wrong: multi-runner seems to have a problem with escape characters, so basically if the path to a file contains a segment (including the file name itself) beginning with n or r or t (and most likely other escape characters) the process fails.

packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\\sl2/  <-- good
packages\\NLog.2.1.0\\lib\net20  <-- bad (notice the missing backslash before \net20)

I verified that after renaming the directory net20 to ~net20 (for testing purpose, not an option for production) the files could be archived as well.

I noticed the bug for files like readme.txt but not for Readme.txt and directories like tools.

Most likely there is a routine that filters the first backslash if any escape char is found.

mentioned in issue #331 (closed)

We will migrate to build in archive creation in 1.0, so it will be solved in this release.

Milestone changed to v1.0

This is resolved by: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/merge_requests/71

Reassigned to @ayufan

mentioned in merge request !71 (merged)

Status changed to closed