GNU bug report logs - #19614
make dist exits succesfully even when tar exits with error

Previous Next

Full log

View this message in rfc822 format

From: Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis <at> gmx.net>
To: Eric Blake <eblake <at> redhat.com>
Cc: 19614 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#19614: make dist exits succesfully even when tar exits with error
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 18:15:08 +0100 (CET)

On Fri, 16 Jan 2015, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 01/16/2015 08:01 AM, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
>> Relevant output from "make V=1 dist":
>>
>> tardir=cfengine-3.7.0a1.5ffcc54 && tar --format=ustar -chf - "$tardir" |
>> GZIP=--best gzip -c >cfengine-3.7.0a1.5ffcc54.tar.gz
>
> It is portable to do something hairy like:
>
> { tar ...; echo $? > file; } | gzip ...
> inspect file
>
> It is even possible to avoid an intermediate file with even hairier exec
> operations to shuffle fds around.
>
> It may be simpler to break things into two steps, with an intermediate
> file instead of a pipeline, although I'm not sure it would be efficient.
>
> But you definitely make a point that we should fix things to detect tar
> failure.

What if we just grep stderr for *any* output from any command in the 
pipeline?

{ tar ... | gzip ... ; } 2>&1 1>/dev/null | grep .

Nobody guarantees that it can't fail silently or it can't succeed despite 
output in stderr, but it's pretty rare.


Dimitris

Previous Next

GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.