On 09/28/11 00:15, Andreas Dilger wrote: > That said, looking more closely at the rest of the code, I see that > a function called full_rw() already exists that calls safe_rw()
Yes, a better fix is for tar to use gnulib's full-read module. That's already on my list of things to do. As we've mentioned, though, it's not high priority. Such a change would be trivial, except that one must carefully think through all replacements of safe_read and full_read and decide whether full_read is really appropriate. When this part of tar was written, I already considered this issue and decided that safe_read was better, but I've forgotten all the pros and cons and need to go back and re-derive them.
