[Bug-tar] Re: GNU tar Feature Question

[Paul Eggert]

"Aaron M. Renn" <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.