Just been debugging a very strange issue where tar was reporting "file changed as we read it" for directories which aren't actually seeing any changes.
It turns out that the value of st_size returned by a call to fstatat on a directory can change even though there have been no changes at all to said directory or its children. It seems that purely looking in a directory will change the "size" value reported by fstatat and likely stat. For a directory which hasn't been traversed / looked in its size is 0 where as after its been looked in it tends to report 8192. The result is that tar which checks for consistency of the data its archiving errors (although soft error) when archiving a directory as on initial access its size is 0 but after compressing all the files in said dir and hence looking in that directory its size is 8192. The attached patch fixes this strange behaviour by ignoring size changes for directories as well as correcting the file size check to also detect file shrinks as well as growths, which seemed very odd. Is there some "meta data" caching going on in cygwin or Windows which causes this very strange behaviour? Regards Steve
tar-src-create.c.patch
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