Re: [Bug-tar] Warning message when reading partial blocks from stdin.

[Gunnar Ritter]

Joerg Schilling <address@hidden> wrote:

> > Laurence Bond <address@hidden> writes:
> > > gzip -d -c a_tar_file.tar.gz | tar tvf - > /dev/null
> > > gtar: Read 9216 bytes from -
[...]
> A tar implementation should only write a warning/error message 
> only when the byte count is not a multiple of 512.

I think it hardly makes sense to impose any requirements on incoming
data beyond the two zero-filled 512-byte blocks at the end of the actual
archive, in particular when physical blocking is meaningless as with a
pipe.

> BTW: a lot of RPM files contain broken CPIO archives (most likely
> created with GNU software) that are not a multiple of 512 and thus
> rejected by star.

SVR4 cpio and its derivatives and clones can also create such archives
with their -C option. Blocking is optional with the POSIX cpio format,
cf. XCU ll. 28010-28012. You should just fix your application. (I assume
both the cpio format and your star program are actually off-topic here,
so we should move the discussion to austin-group-l if there is any point
in continuing it.)

        Gunnar