Subject: Re: tar problem?
To: Charles M. Hannum <mycroft@mit.edu>
From: Robert Nestor <rnestor@metronet.com>
List: current-users
Date: 12/28/1997 07:36:49
Charles M. Hannum <mycroft@mit.edu> wrote:

>This is vaguely correct behaviour.  The tar format uses a record of
>all 0s as a terminator, so when tar(1) sees it, it cleans up and
>exits.  If the tar file was originally written with a larger block
>size, you may not read all of the 0s at the end before tar(1) exits,
>which would leave gzip(1) with a broken pipe to write the rest of them
>to.

I saw this problem when I created a tar file on a NetBSD/i386 systen (tar 
-czvf x.tgz .) and untarred it on a NetBSD/mac68k system (tar -xzvf 
x.tgz).  I haven't done anything to change the default block sizes in my 
login scripts on either system, so I gather the two ports are using 
different defaults then?  Both are running the latest 1.3 BETA snapshots.

-bob