Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2001 15:23:08 -0800 (PST) From: Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com> To: Andrew.Hodgkins@hurlburt.af.mil Cc: kstewart@urx.com, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: RE: Proposed makewhatis perl script fix Message-ID: <200102102323.f1ANN8J28387@earth.backplane.com> References: <B5055445D778D31189CA0020484037D001B68503@vexwrst02.hurlburt.af.mil>
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:> I noticed this hasn't made it to -stable yet. Just an oversight, or did
:> something break?
:
:Actually, I don't think it fixed everything. There have been ports
:that also had problems with piping to tar and broken pipes. It
:wouldn't surprise me if the makewhatis problem was only a little piece
:of what is broken.
:
:Kent
makewhatis is just makewhatis... it has nothing to do with tar.
When you tar something up, tar writes full blocks. But when you untar
something the actual end of the archive may occur in the middle of a
block. tar will close the input descriptor 'early' in this case,
potentially before gunzip or uncompress manage to write the last block
of zeros.
Usually the -i option to tar (e.g. --ignore-zeros) will 'fix' this
problem by causing tar to read until it gets an actual EOF. The
-B (--read-full-blocks) option may also help. The reason this occurs
is because gunzip/uncompress do not write out their data in the block
size tar expects, causing tar to do piecemeal reads. It's really tar's
fault that it occurs.
-Matt
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