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From: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: backups on 386/ix - some pronblems using GNUtar; any hints?
Summary: probably GNU tar does not close directories...
Keywords: backups, 386ix, GNUtar, tape streamer
Message-ID: <1511@aber-cs.UUCP>
Date: 7 Dec 89 16:56:05 GMT
Reply-To: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi)
Organization: Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth
	(Disclaimer: my statements are purely personal)
Lines: 20

In article <1989Dec5.012032.2877@virtech.uucp> cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
    In article <481@hades.OZ>, greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) writes:
    > 1) When the tape is completely full, GNUtar reports "error opening
    > directory ...." for every directory not yet covered. At least, this seems
    > to be what's happening. If the tape drive is 120Mb, and the filesystem is
    > 115Mb, how come the tape fills up at all anyway when doing a full dump???.
    
    This is probably because you have some sparse files on the file system.  When
    they get backed up, they take up the logical amount of space, not the physical
    amount of space taken up on the file system.

A likely reason would be that GNU tar, while walking the filesystem tree,
forgets to close directories that it has opened, when unstacking them and
thus runs out of file descriptor slots. Since a typical 386 unix has 60 fd
slots per process, this may take a while, and make you believe that you have
dumped too much.
-- 
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk