Re: [Bug-tar] Warning message when reading partial blocks from stdin.

[Joerg Schilling]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:

> > Really? 7th edition tar checks the number of bytes returned after the
> > first call to read() only.
>
> I was referring to historical practice in creating files.  POSIX
> specifies only the file format; it doesn't specify tar's behavior.

If you follow the POSIX rules for _creating_ tar archives, you cannot
have archivesize % TBLOCK != 0

As we do no longer live in the 1970s, it is obious to test for
impossible things and to warn.....

BSD tar does not work at all when a read size is not a multiple of 512.

Star aborts with an error message is a read(2) returns less than 512 bytes;
this is also true when reading CPIO archives.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:address@hidden (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       address@hidden           (uni)  
       address@hidden   (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.berlios.de/old/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily