TODO: Broken pipe warning when viewing large *.tar.gz files

[Leonard den Ottolander <leonard den ottolander nl>]

Hi,

Moving on to the last item on the TODO list for 4.6.1! We should start
discussing a feature freeze soon.

Item concerned is "Broken pipe warning when viewing large *.tar.gz
files".

First, on my system (Fedora Core 1) I do *not* get a "broken pipe"
error. Just a "gzip: stdout: No space left on device" followed by a
"Cannot open tar archive <name>" on opening a tgz when /tmp doesn't have
enough free space. Can people with other OSes confirm the behaviour
mentioned in the TODO?

This of course doesn't stop us from implementing a file size and free
space (and quota?) check before commencing the gunzip. However, gzip -l
does not report the uncompressed size correctly for files > 4GB (I
verified from output the returned value is modulo 4GB, not 2GB):

$ ls -l isos.tgz 
-rw-rw-r--  1 leonard leonard 5722621499 Sep 15 22:44 isos.tgz
$ gzip -l isos.tgz 
         compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
         5722621499          1515894784 -277.5% isos.tar

Of course this can be somewhat worked around (fe for high negative
values use compressed value).

Also there is the question whether one can assume gzip on different
systems returns identically formatted output.

Leonard.

-- 
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research