Re: [Libguestfs] [PATCH 1/2] Fix tar-in command hangs when running out of disk space

>From 07f4b20ae959069fca41756b0dc103ec5fa99754 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Richard Jones <rjones(a)redhat.com&gt; Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2010 08:48:38 +0100 Subject: [PATCH 1/2] Fix tar-in command hangs when running out of disk space (RHBZ#580246). The problem was this sequence of events: (1) File transfer goes through OK. (2) pclose returns failure (because 'tar' subprocess failed) (3) We try to cancel the transfer by calling cancel_receive. Step (3) fails because the transfer (as far as the library is concerned) has succeeded, so causing a hang. The more fundamental reason why we see steps (1) and (2) is that 'tar' does NOT fail immediately if there is a write error. Instead it continues reading and discarding the input until the end of the input before giving "Error exit delayed from previous errors". IMHO this is a bug with tar, since an ENOSPC write error should be fatal for tar.