Error message: tar: could not stat /some/valid/file

[uunet!bria!mike]

In article <459 at twg.bc.ca> twg.bc.ca!bill (Bill Irwin) writes:
>Since  this is a large archive on a 60Mb tape I am prompted twice
>to insert the next volume.  I find it strange that this prompting
>message  is sent to the standard error (and thus to the error log
>file)  rather than the standard output [...]

The reason that tar writes to standard error is that you could just
as easily do:

	tar cvfF - /tmp/Master.list | dd of=/dev/rmt0 bs=512k

If tar displayed it's messages on stdout, then in this case the tape
archive would get hosed ...

-- 
Michael Stefanik, Systems Engineer (JOAT), Briareus Corporation
UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike
--
technoignorami (tek'no-ig'no-ram`i) a group of individuals that are constantly
found to be saying things like "Well, it works on my DOS machine ..."