Bug 31715

Summary: Erroneous "file truncated" messages
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Raw Hide Reporter: Bill Crawford <billc>
Component: textutilsAssignee: Karsten Hopp <karsten>
Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME QA Contact: Aaron Brown <abrown>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 1.0   
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2001-03-20 15:19:39 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Flags
Output of "tail -f" on a wget log file
none
output of "tail -f update.log" on wget output. none

Description Bill Crawford 2001-03-13 21:28:58 UTC 
Quite frequently, when I "tail -f" a file which is the output of wget, I
see (immediately) a message that says the file has been truncated.  I added
a bit of debugging code and rebuilt, and discover that it's always claiming
the file has been truncated by one or two bytes.

I'll attach a sample of the output in a tick ...
Comment 1 Bill Crawford 2001-03-13 21:52:28 UTC 
Created attachment 12630 [details]
Output of "tail -f" on a wget log file
Comment 2 Bill Crawford 2001-03-14 18:46:01 UTC 
Oops.  Yes, component should indeed be "textutils" ...

If it's relevant, I suspect it could also be related to the partition being on
ReiserFS, but I don't seem to have any problem other than this one case, and
it's *always* just after I start the process, and doesn't repeat if I leave it
running for any length of time.

I can try to test later whether that's related, i.e. I'll run it on an ext2
partition to be sure.
Comment 3 Bill Crawford 2001-03-20 14:20:18 UTC 
Yes, this manifests itself on ext2 as well, so is not an artifact of using
reiserfs.
Comment 4 Bill Crawford 2001-03-20 14:21:31 UTC 
Created attachment 13123 [details]
output of "tail -f update.log" on wget output.
Comment 5 Karsten Hopp 2001-03-20 14:49:23 UTC 
I failed to reproduce this here. What is the exact command sequence ?
Is it like this:

ls LOG   ->  LOG   (File exists, but wget doesn't run yet)
tail -f LOG
wget -o LOG ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/linux-2.4.2.tar.bz2

or is there no LOG and you start tail -f after the wget command ?
Comment 6 Bill Crawford 2001-03-20 15:19:34 UTC 
No, it only happens if I start the tail after the wget command is already
running.  It happens about 1 time in 5 or 6 here, while running:

wget --mirror -nH --cut-dirs=2 ftp://ftp.redhat.com//pub/rawhide/i386/ >
update.log 2>&1 &
tail -f update.log
(repeat until problem appears, in this case the fifth time).

I suspect the "read as much as you can" code in tail.c is incorrectly setting
the file size, or it could at a pinch be a VFS bug in the kernel.  I've only
noticed this recently, though.