gzip breaks : read from STDIN & write to STDOUT : on certain hosts

[Mohamed K. Filzer]

Hi All,

 

I find that gzip breaks only on certain hosts when trying to read from
STDIN and write to STDOUT.

Please find the details below:

 

Gzip version: 1.2.4

Compilation options:

DIRENT UTIME STDC_HEADERS HAVE_UNISTD_H ASMV

-

Format of command used (issued from sh 2.05):

tar cf - file1 file2 file3 2>/dev/null | /path/to/compiled/gzip -c -1 >
file.tar.gz

 

error produced:

gzip: stdin: fstat(stdin)

 

<file /path/to/gzip> output:

: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for
GNU/Linux 2.2.5, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped

 

result:

file.tar.gz is created but of 0 bytes.

 

when:

Only on certain hosts; but the behavior is not random, but happens
always on these hosts.

 

The host is a 64bit Quad-core Intel Xeon.For the hardware description, I
am attaching the /proc/cpuinfo details.

The host runs SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 SP3 (x86_64) and is on
kernel 2.6.16.21-0.9-smp

I ve tried using gzip version 1.3.5, tcsh 6.12.00 (without the STDERR
redirection on tar), bash 2.05, filenames of differing lengths but the
behavior is consistent.

 

Work-around:

Adding the -n option to the existing options (-c -1) makes gzip to work
fine on these failing hosts.

But since the tar+gzip is called by a binary, we can't add the -n
option.

Nevertheless, the question remains why does gzip break on certain hosts
but runs just fine on some other.

 

Could someone please help in this regard ?

 

Thanks,

Filzer

failing_host.cpuinfo
Description: failing_host.cpuinfo