[Bug-tar] tar -tf quits before EOF?

[Dustin J. Mitchell]

I'd appreciate a bit of confirmation of my understanding of tar
behavior.  We (the Amanda team) have a user who is seeing SIGPIPE when
verifying a dump using 'tar -tf -'.  A truss (yep, it's Solaris..)
shows the tar process happily munching data at 10k per go, and
outputting filenames:

10350:  read(0, 0x080AA000, 10240)                      = 10240
10350:  write(1, 0x080AE034, 114)                       = 114
10350:  write(1, 0x080AE034, 121)                       = 121
... (actual data omitted to protect the innocent)

Then, without warning, and without seeing any EOF or even a short read
on fd 0, tar up and exits cleanly:
...
10350:  write(1, 0x080AE034, 98)                        = 98
10350:  read(0, 0x080AA000, 10240)                      = 10240
10350:  write(1, 0x080AE034, 102)                       = 102
10350:  write(1, 0x080AE034, 14)                        = 14
10350:  close(0)                                        = 0
10350:  close(1)                                        = 0
10350:  close(2)                                        = 0
10350:  _exit(0)

and, of course, the Amanda process writing to the other end of the
pipe gets SIGPIPE.  I believe, but have not verified with the user,
that this occurs at the end of the tarfile.  Amanda (well, the tape
drive really) pads the tarfile out with zeroes to a multiple of the
block size (32k).

My understanding is that tar should keep running until it gets EOF on
its input - that there's no explicit indication within a tarfile that
would cause tar to exit normally without reading to EOF.  A bit of
experimentation with /dev/zero on my own systems lends credence to
this understanding, but of course does not prove it:
  (tar -cf - ChangeLog; cat /dev/zero) |  tar -tf -
  ChangeLog
(this hangs forever here, and truss or strace shows tar reading a lot
of 0's without any _exit(0) action..)

If there's something I've missed about tar's behavior, or if you have
any other suggestions, please share!

Dustin

-- 
Open Source Storage Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com