Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!udel!haven.umd.edu!mimsy!mojo!mojo!djm From: djm@eng.umd.edu (David J. MacKenzie) Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell Subject: Re: Bash, tar, and broken pipe Message-ID: Date: 22 May 91 18:22:11 GMT References: <16345@helios.TAMU.EDU> Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (C-News) Organization: Project GLUE, University of Maryland Lines: 7 In-Reply-To: heinz@cc.univie.ac.at's message of 22 May 91 12:51:43 GMT I think the reason for the broken pipe is that 'tar tf -' ignores the padding at the end of the tar file; tar files are always an even multiple of the blocksize in length, so they get padded with garbage or nulls. The 'foo' program writes the nulls into the pipe, but tar never reads them. -- David J. MacKenzie