Re: [Bug-tar] Tar short read

[Paul Eggert]

On 09/27/11 12:18, Kevin Fox wrote:
> No, what could happen is a user could stop tar mid stream, then continue
> it, and a read might show up partial and tar would freak out.

In practice real systems don't do partial reads after a start/continue,
when you're reading such small buffers from regular files.

As far as tar goes, it's low priority to fix this, as the problem
occurs only in file systems that are so incompatible with common
behavior that they will break lots of applications.  (This is true
regardless of whether POSIX allows this file-system behavior.)

It wouldn't hurt to change tar, I suppose, so long as the change
doesn't overly hurt performance or clarity, but this is really more
of a case where it's better to fix the file system than to fix the
many applications that the file-system behavior would break.