Re: [Bug-tar] Do not fail when 'compress' is unable to provide sufficient compress ratio

[Tim Kientzle]

On Apr 29, 2013, at 11:27 AM, Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote:

> Paul Eggert wrote:
>> If you look at the gzip source code you'll
>> find a number of circumstances that will
>> cause it to exit with status 2, as a warning.
> 
> Then gzip's API differs from compress's API[1] (return 2 only if size 
> increases and -f is not specified), and from "standard" API (only 0 means 
> success).
> 
> [1]http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/compress.html
> 
>    The following exit values shall be returned:
>     0  Successful completion.
>     1  An error occurred.
>     2  One or more files were not compressed because they would have 
> increased in size (and the -f option was not specified).
>    >2  An error occurred.

If you look at the source code for "compress", you find
that the return code 2 is *only* used when compressing
files in-place.

It does not apply when compressing stdin to stdout.

I believe GNU tar forks compressors to compress from
stdin to stdout, so this should never occur.

Tim