Subject: "trailing garbage ignored" message on gzcat

From: Brian Salter-Duke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 11:03:58 +1100

I have set up gzip, gtar etc for taring and compressing on the fly
and it works well, except that when I gzcat a dir.tar.gz after
downloading it from the frp server, it tells me "trailing garbage
ignored". This happens on a Digital Unix machine compiling the
static gzip that compresses the directory with both DU cc and gcc.

I looked at the archives and there are a couple of messages about
this in March 1998, but there does not seem to be a definitive
answer to the two questions - (1) are the resulting files OK,
and (2) how can remove this message. Does anyone have any ideas.

Cheers, Brian.
-- 
        Associate Professor Brian Salter-Duke (Brian Duke)
School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Northern Territory University,
  Darwin, NT 0909, Australia.  Phone 08-89466702. Fax 08-89466847
e-mail: [email-masked]  WWW http://lacebark.ntu.edu.au/chemistry

---

From: Gregory A Lundberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 12:10:24 -0400 (EDT)

On Tue, 11 May 1999, Brian Salter-Duke wrote:

> I have set up gzip, gtar etc for taring and compressing on the fly and
> it works well, except that when I gzcat a dir.tar.gz after downloading
> it from the frp server, it tells me "trailing garbage ignored". This
> happens on a Digital Unix machine compiling the static gzip that
> compresses the directory with both DU cc and gcc.
> 
> I looked at the archives and there are a couple of messages about this
> in March 1998, but there does not seem to be a definitive answer to
> the two questions - (1) are the resulting files OK, and (2) how can
> remove this message. Does anyone have any ideas.

You need /dev/null to do away with the garbage preventing use of the file.

The result will then be clean, but will be blocked (at least on my Linux
systems) in 10K-byte blocks with trailing NULs.  This can be fixed, but
I've never taken the time to deterine what tar option needs to go where in
ftpconversions to fix it.  These trailing NULs should no effect the
usability of the tar.gz file (at least they don't for me .. I just don't
like the wasted space).

-- 

Gregory A Lundberg              Senior Partner, VRnet Company
1441 Elmdale Drive              [email-masked]
Kettering, OH 45409-1615 USA    1-800-809-2195