Re: [Bug-tar] I: tar-1.23 SIGPIPE regression

[Eric Blake]

On 03/19/2010 01:51 PM, Dmitry V. Levin wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 09:15:28PM +0200, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote:
>> Dmitry V. Levin <address@hidden> ha escrit:
>>
>>> introduces a regression:
>>>
>>> $ touch empty && tar -cf empty.tar empty && tar -tf empty.tar | :
>>> tar: write error
>>
>> This is intended behavior: instead of silently ignoring the error,
>> tar reports it.
> 
> I understand that this change was intended, but I'm not sure that all
> consequences of the change was taken into account.  Now an innocent code
> like "tar -tf $file |grep -q $pattern" produces misleading error output,
> and the only way to avoid it is to suppress tar's stderr completely. :(
> I hope the change was not designed to produce such a negative side effect.

It may be worth asking the question of the Austin group (the folks in
charge of POSIX) whether or not a process that detects write failures
because of EPIPE (when sigpipe is ignored) falls into the normal
category of being required to diagnose the error and exit with non-zero
status, or whether it should be special-cased and cause silent exits.
Tar is not the first project where people have complained about the
level of verbosity present due to EPIPE write errors, but without any
further blessing from the POSIX folks specifically stating that EPIPE
should be special-cased, we are only following the POSIX rules as we
understand them.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature