tar from crontab bug

[Sergei Vorobyov]

Cheers!

I experience the following strange behavior of tar:

1. when manually invoked from konsole (xterm), 

   tar cvzf z2.tgz 200*/

   produces a perfect archive z2.tgz, as witnessed by tar tvzf z2.tgz

2. however, when the same command is run automatically from the crontab

   # backup line in crontab
   36 20 * * * tar cvzf z1.tgz 200*/

(run it at 20:36 every day, time does not matter I tried it with
different times)

then the subsequent tar tvzf z1.tgz reveals that z1.tgz is corrupted:

...
-rw-r--r-- sergei/sergei 105057 2002-05-03 15:46:48 2002/cu/uu-logo-c-gray.eps
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

(actually, this unexpected EOF does not necessarily occur in the same
file, so this is not a particular problem with uu-logo-c-gray.eps)

I wonder whether this is a known bug, and whether any remedies exist.

I am running Mandrake Linux 9.0:

address@hidden sergei]$ tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.13.25
address@hidden sergei]$ uname -a
Linux cook 2.4.19-16mdk #1 Fri Sep 20 18:15:05 CEST 2002 i686 unknown
unknown GNU/Linux

Thanks and best regards,
Sergei
--
Sergei Vorobyov
Information Technology Department
Uppsala University
Box 337
S-751 05 Uppsala
Sweden