Question about my boneheaded tar/gzip move.

[DaLoverhino]

Hello. I have a huge tar file. So far, it's taken about 4 hours to
untar and it is till going.

I'll have enough space to unpack it but it will be tight.

To save some space, in another xwindow, I started to compress some
files.

And by accident, I started to gzip the very tar file I was unpacking!

So, the gzip ran for awhile before I realized my mistake and that's
when I killed gzip. I killed gzip before it compressed the entire
tar file, but I don't know if that will affect the untarring.

My guess is gzip won't remove the original file with a compressed file
until it completely compresses the new file, so I am safe.

Is my guess correct, or am I just wishful thinking? I'd rather not
restart the tar file again.

thanks.

[Stephane CHAZELAS]

2009-08-17, 11:49(-07), DaLoverhino:

[...]

In any case, you're safe, even if gzip did remove the file and
even if it had gone through completely, you'd be safe. You'd
even be safer if the file had been removed as that would
guarantee nobody would ever corrupt the file.

gzip stores the compressed version in a new file, so the
original is kept as is. Even if it unlinks the orgininal, the
file is not removed (and the space it takes is not reclaimed)
until every process that had it opened (such as your tar
command) closes it.

One question one may ask is why you had an uncompressed tar file
in the first place.

--
Stï¿œphane

[DaLoverhino]

On Aug 17, 2:59 pm, Stephane CHAZELAS <stephane_chaze...@yahoo.fr>
wrote:

> Stéphane

Great. Whew!! I need to unzip, uncompress a tar file, because it's
part of object oriented database that needs the file unpacked. I'm
loading up an old version of the database looking for some data needed
for blah blah.... well I'd rather not bore you.

But thanks for the piece of mind. And still untarring... :(

[Gerard H. Pille]

DaLoverhino schreef:

>
> Great. Whew!! I need to unzip, uncompress a tar file, because it's
> part of object oriented database that needs the file unpacked. I'm
> loading up an old version of the database looking for some data needed
> for blah blah.... well I'd rather not bore you.
>
> But thanks for the piece of mind. And still untarring... :(
>

That piece of mind probably gave you some peace of mind.