Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!acorn!pcolmer From: pcolmer@acorn.co.uk (Philip Colmer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn Subject: Re: problems with !extract Message-ID: <7161@acorn.co.uk> Date: 20 May 91 07:05:01 GMT Article-I.D.: acorn.7161 References: Sender: pcolmer@acorn.co.uk Distribution: comp Organization: Acorn Computers Ltd, Cambridge, England Lines: 24 In article dbh@doc.ic.ac.uk (Denis Howe) writes: >Two hints concerning extracting stuff from uuencoded, compressed tar >archives (as used by !Extract): > >1. Tar seems to hang up or fall over if there isn't enough free RAM to >run compress. The current release of !Submit and !Extract actually treat compression as a separate stage from tarring. In addition, !Extract will grab all the memory it can before executing either tar or compress. Unfortunately, the real problem seems to lie in an interaction between tar and the filing systems in that under certain circumstances, tar will try and do something and the filing system will come back with a strange error, at which point tar will sit there asking you if you want to continue. Unfortunately, !Extract will have piped this into a file, so you don't know that :-( The latest version of tar is supposed to support a Q option which causes it to return an error rather than ask the question, but I couldn't get it to work, and timescales are preventing me from looking at it. --Fil. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Philip Colmer, OA Project Leader, Acorn Computers Ltd (pcolmer@acorn.co.uk)