Useless garbage as output

[Nicola Girardi]

Hello,
 
I was writing a shell script in which I want tar output on stdout, but
I discovered that there's something wrong. I'll show you just a test
case:

: address@hidden(tty3):~$ tar czf - non_existent_file > file.tar.gz
: tar: Cannot add file non_existent_file: No such file or directory
: tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Obviously the warning...

: address@hidden(tty3):~$ ll file.tar.gz
: -rw-r--r--   1 nicola   users       10240 Nov 18 20:46 file.tar.gz

But how come that 10240 bytes were written to the file?

: address@hidden(tty3):~$ tar --version
: tar (GNU tar) 1.13

Here's the version information you might need.

Regards,

-- 
Nicola Girardi, address@hidden