tar - file changed as we read it

Originally Posted by robertkwild You think its still tarring up those individual files its producing the warning for or it just gives up altogether and fails the whole tar as its producing loads of warnings for individual files?

I don't know. Did you try running tar with the --warning=no-file-changed option?

no not yet sorry hydrurga i will try it monday when im back at work as the script is on my work pc, i will let you know def

i know what i will do to check if the tar is the same as the source directory i will do this -

tar -cf - after_louise_1606/ | md5sum

md5sum after_louise_1606.tar

and if there is no corruption they should be the same md5sum figures

still no joy im afraid even when i put in at the end of the tar command --warning=no-file-changed the tar still fails

strange thing is when i did tar -cf - after_louise_1606/ | md5sum, it said the exact same things ie the same warning i was getting before but it managed to produce a md5sum string

How about you make a copy of the directory, run the tar on the original directory, then compare the directory with the directory copy you made in order to see if any files or directories have been updated (contents or metadata) in the meantime. If tar says that some files are being changed, you need to find out which ones.

Depending on the results, you can then do the same thing again but without running tar, just pausing 5 minutes or so, to see if it is tar itself that is somehow making the changes.

I still do not know if you got the same md5sum or not.

i think i know what the problem is, its because im running the tar command over an nfs share and not on the local drive, this is why im getting read errors as when i run the tar command on my local disk (copy the data over to my local disk) it creates the tar fine

has any else encountered this problem?

I still can't see any problem, I don't know why can't you accept: the files were modified during the tar process. Probably they were accessed from another host, I have no idea. But you may have time related problems too.

mmm...

so as its a share its probably opened somewhere else, i need to see the NFS settings on the server