Re: [Bug-tar] Re: GNU tar Feature Question

[Aaron M. Renn]

Paul Eggert (address@hidden) wrote:
> Thanks.  These symptoms indicate that tar found a bad header, and then
> couldn't resynchronize and find a good header after that.  Perhaps you
> can investigate why that would be, though I'm afraid this might
> require a debugger.  As far as I know, doesn't exit immediately simply
> because it finds a bad header.

I haven't looked at the code, but I suspect that it probably gives up
after a period of time.  My previous patch, which was designed specifically
to handle situations where several blocks may have been lost in a 
backup file, basically never give up.  It performed the highly simplistic
strategy of just advancing one byte at a time looking for something it
could extract - till the end of the file if necessary.  Simple but
effective.

-- 
Aaron M. Renn (address@hidden) http://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/