On 09/27/11 12:18, Kevin Fox wrote: > No, what could happen is a user could stop tar mid stream, then continue > it, and a read might show up partial and tar would freak out.
In practice real systems don't do partial reads after a start/continue, when you're reading such small buffers from regular files. As far as tar goes, it's low priority to fix this, as the problem occurs only in file systems that are so incompatible with common behavior that they will break lots of applications. (This is true regardless of whether POSIX allows this file-system behavior.) It wouldn't hurt to change tar, I suppose, so long as the change doesn't overly hurt performance or clarity, but this is really more of a case where it's better to fix the file system than to fix the many applications that the file-system behavior would break.
