Bug 773068

Summary:	tar produces SIGABRT and core dumps when attempting to append to a compressed archive
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	Reporter:	Dylan Gross <dgross>
Component:	tar	Assignee:	Ondrej Vasik <ovasik>
Status:	CLOSED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	qe-baseos-daemons
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	5.7
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2012-01-10 20:37:08 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:

Description Dylan Gross 2012-01-10 20:18:07 UTC

Description of problem:

When attempting to append to a compressed archive, tar ends with SIGABRT and produces a core file, rather than a message that is helpful to the user.  Customer acknowledges that the usage is incorrect and the correct usage is documented, but feels an error message would be more appropriate than a core dump.

In RHEL6 (tar-1.23-3.el6), this has already been modified to return a message to the user saying:

"tar: Cannot update compressed archives
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information"

Requesting that this fix be backported to RHEL5


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

tar-1.15.1-30.el5


How reproducible:

Steps to Reproduce:
1.   echo "hello" > file1
2.   echo "goodbye" > file2
3.   tar zcvf mycompressedarchive.tar.gz file1
4.   tar zrvf mycompressedarchive.tar.gz file2
  
Actual results:

"Aborted (core dumped)

Expected results:

tar: Cannot update compressed archives
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information

Additional info:

Comment 1 Ondrej Vasik 2012-01-10 20:37:08 UTC

Thanks for report, however, it is a duplicate of already fixed issue. RHEL-5 tar can't append to compressed archive - but I agree that crash is not nice way how to handle that. In RHEL-6 it shows informative error message and so does tar-1.15.1-31.el5 - which is the latest RHEL-5 tar (rhel-5.8 fastrack).

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 675693 ***