Bash, tar, and broken pipe

[Byron Rakitzis]

Heinz (heinz at cc.univie.ac.at) sent me some personal mail which I could
not reply to (is there another address I could use to get mail to you,
Heinz?). However, he raised an interesting point:

Given a pipeline

	foo | tar ft -

it seems clear that tar must read to EOF in order to determine whether
the tar file that foo writes has come to an end or not. Therefore a
normal instance of

	foo | tar ft -

should not cause a pipe to break, since tar will always terminate after
foo. I have no clue why tar is exiting prematurely. If anyone can shed
light on the matter, I think Heinz and I would appreciate it. (Servus,
Heinz!)


--
Byron Rakitzis
byron at archone.tamu.edu