On Fri 11 Apr 2008 08:08:49 NZST +1200, Steve Holdoway wrote: > > The gzip and bzip2 (de)compressions are built into tar itself. If this > > Are you sure? They never used to be. You always used to have to install > bzip2 before the j option would work.
A decade ago when I compiled gnu stuff for slowlaris (slow to catch up with decent shell programs) zlib o.e. was optionally needed for compression support. bzip2 came later. Seeing that tar is a pretty low-level tool which system operation to some extend depends on, it makes sense not to add a reliance on being able to exec other binaries. But here's the pudding: touch file strace -e trace=process tar -cjf bla.tar.bz2 file No exec other than for /bin/tar. No other binary program file access with trace=file either. On my tar at least the compressions are built in, I guess it's possible that other distros do it differently. It still doesn't explain the truncated tar output - if rudiments of a tar directory listing exist, the compression must have gone at least that far. Other thought: check whether app-armor etc kicks in from/for cron (check syslog). Roger, please write a script which produces no output and does your backup. You want to add at the top: exec >/tmp/stdout.$$ exec 2>/tmp/stderr.$$ ulimit -a env Run from shell. Verify there's no output! Then run from cron. Compare files, esp the stderr. No matter whether you found a workaround, I'd want to know why it fails. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
