linux gzip flakiness?

[Ken Shih]

Hello,

I have a shell script that gzips a file then moves it to an archive
directory.  It does this every day.  Every day, I also pipe "gzip -dc" to
some more commands to generate a report.  Occasionally, say once a month or
so, I'll get these error messages from the gzipped file, when gunzipping or
gzip -dc:
gzip: file.gz: invalid compressed data--crc error 
gzip: file.gz: invalid compressed data--length error 

Is there some known issue about this bug creeping in?  I've done some
searching online & haven't found anything that seems to really understand
this problem.

Some info on the last time it happend:
1. the original file was 85,033,598 bytes large, pre-gzip
2. post-gzip the corrupted file is only about 50bytes different in size than
the non-corrupted gzipped file
3. I am unable to reproduce the problem, even on the same file.  It just
seems to show up every now and then.  Most of the time it just works.
4. address@hidden kens]$ uname -a
Linux md101 2.4.20-8smp #1 SMP Thu Mar 13 17:45:54 EST 2003 i686 i686 i386
GNU/Linux
5. address@hidden kens]$ gzip -V
gzip 1.3.3
(2002-03-08)

Thanks in advance for any knowledge you might have about this!  If this is
not the appropriate place to ask for help/log a bug, please let me know
where I should go instead & apologies.

Best,
Ken Shih