Hi Mike, > you may say "well just check the exit status of tar and go with that", but > that doesnt work for cases where the decompressor > crashes/exits/whatever early on and tar gets a short archive.
For the best of my knowledge, it does work for these cases as well. When extracting using a decompressor, the only signal tar tolerates is SIGPIPE. If the decompressor exits due to any other signal, or simply exits with a non-0 exit code, tar reports it and exits with code 2. In its turn, SIGPIPE can be delivered to the decompressor only because tar has closed its side of the pipe. In that case tar either knows what it is doing (as in the described case), or issues error message, if exiting due to some earlier error. Regards, Sergey
