[Bug-tar] Re: GNU tar Feature Question

[Aaron M. Renn]

Paul Eggert (address@hidden) wrote:
> > Do you have any plans to introduce a feature to tar to allow it
> > to skip over bad blocks in the archive?  As part of my gzip Recovery 
> > Toolkit,
> > I patched tar 1.13.25 to do this, but it was a hack and half.  Before
> > looking into porting that patch into the new release, I wanted to find
> > out if this is something you are working on.  It strikes me as a singlularly
> > useful feature.  Today if tar ever finds something it doesn't like in the
> > file, it just reports and error and exits.
> 
> Can you please be more specific, using an example from the behavior of
> tar 1.15.1?  Tar has gotten better in this area recently, but no doubt
> there is room for further improvement.

Hello.  I recovered my video card and ran a test on a corrupted backup
that I have laying around.  tar 1.15.1 dies the minute it hits bad data,
the same as all previous verions.  Here's the message:

-rw------- arenn/users 4613506 2002-09-17 23:17:54 arenn/Mail/sent
-rw------- arenn/users 2930421 2002-07-20 20:24:34 arenn/Mail/classpath
-rw------- arenn/users   15953 1999-03-23 22:20:34 arenn/Mail/ssowder_utils
-rw------- arenn/users 2306213 2002-05-11 11:35:57 arenn/Mail/breakdown
/usr/local/src/tar-1.15.1/src/tar: Skipping to next header
/usr/local/src/tar-1.15.1/src/tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
/usr/local/src/tar-1.15.1/src/tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
address@hidden tmp]$

-- 
Aaron M. Renn (address@hidden) http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/