Re: File ends unexpectedly at pos XXX when compressing

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Scott Mcdermott wrote:
> You are right, I did not think it were possible, but there were read
> errors on the NVME device in the kernel log, which I was able to
> reproduce with 'dd' skip to the LBA and issue reads.  Interestingly,
> "tar | pbzip2" finished the whole thing without error, although
> repeated attempts with "tarlz" always produced errors.

This might be because tarlz reads and compresses files in parallel 
(multithreaded) when creating a compressed archive, while tar reads files 
sequentially (one at a time). You can make tarlz read files sequentially by 
passing option -n0 in the command line:

-n N
--threads=N
Set the number of (de)compression threads, overriding the system's default. 
Valid values range from 0 to "as many as your system can support". A value 
of 0 disables threads entirely.

> > I have just added to my list of pending tasks to improve the
> > diagnostic above to specify whether the cause is EOF or some
> > error.
>
> Excellent, strerror() would be useful to print in latter case...

I have already implemented the improved diagnostic. It will appear in the 
next version of tarlz.

Best regards,
Antonio.