Hi Rand, thanks for the mail. For the next time, having the report directly in mail would be much better :).
Rand wrote: > gtar abends apparently stuck in a loop while backing up the primary > device on my Mac. > > I’m backing to an external drive attached via FireWire-800. > > The included text below shows it start looping on /dev…. Massive amount > of this text appears while finishing/aborting the backup, which is > identically repeated when listing the backup. > > Duplicate backups done several days previously did not do this. > > I had several external disks mounted before I started the backup that I > dismounted to turn off the drives before starting. ... > 07:13:29 7 Desktop $gtar --version > tar (GNU tar) 1.28 ... > 07:05:50 4 Desktop $sudo time gtar -cvf /Volumes/FW250G/Mac250SSD_B.gtar > --one-file-system * ... gtar: dev/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/4/fd/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5/5 . . . . . . . . [abend] Seems like this directory is rather very deep so it makes GNU tar to recurse too much. This sounds like issue mentioned in [1] (there are proposed patches to avoid recursion, ping?). But since the recursion is now in GNU tar, you can try to make the stack space a bit larger (`ulimit -s 32768`). Also, backing up /dev or /proc directories is probably not very useful. [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg04890.html Pavel
