Re: possible memory corruption in tar

[Paul Eggert]

> From: "Omer Woloch" <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 17:54:30 +0200

> When tracing it with truss, I discovered that while it opens a file for
> output getting fd=193, when it tries to write, it actually writes to fd=122

It's not memory corruption.  It simply is a consequence of tar's
bizarre handling of file descriptors: it mishandles file descriptors
above 128.

I worked around the problem in tar 1.13.16 by changing the bizarre
code to use 1073741824 instead of 128.  So with recent test versions
of tar you should be OK (unless you have 1073741824 files open. :-)
It'd be nice if someone would have the time to fix the code
permanently, in all cases.

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/tar/tar-1.13.25.tar.gz

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