On Thu, 2 May 2002, Benjamin Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> GNU tar does this. Seriously. If checks to see if the target device is
> /dev/null, and if so, skips some of the I/O operations. I discovered this
> when I wanted to exercise a disk, so I tried tar'ing it up to /dev/null, and
> what should have taken minutes completed in seconds! :-)
Yes, I found this too. I believe it does this so one can quickly get
a listing (say) of the output from tar without having tar read all
of the files from the disk. Useful if you had some complicated
exclude/include directives and wanted to test what would be backed
up quickly.
I suppose this would get around it:
tar -cf - /foo | cat > /dev/null
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