I stumbled across a somewhat strange behavior of tar and find no explanation for it: i was testing a DVD for read errors and thought to simply tar the content and direct the output to /dev/null:

This way i expected the system to read the complete content and eventually to report a read error if there is one. To my amazement the command came back immediately without any error. Still i didn't believe it had read anything (save for maybe the directory information) so i directed the output to a real file instead.
This time tar did read the files and subsequently reported the read error i was expecting in one file.

My question is, why didn't it read the files before? Is there something i am missing?

bakunin

I too did experimentation, but it displayed all the file names.

Before that why you would want to tar and check the integrity, better you can do by reading all the files !!

Use find command with exec, or use dd command with bs & count to read.

The parameter after "-f" is the archive filename. A value of "-" when there is no pipeline has no sensible meaning.

Try:

First off, I'd like to state that i do NOT have a problem. I just want to achieve a better understanding. So you don't need to tell me workarounds, as i have already found one.

This is exactly what i was expecting tar to do: read all the files.

Sorry, but this is simply not true: the dash as a filename is signifying <stdout> and if i use a redirection or a pipeline to manipulate tars output further should make no difference.

In fact (as i have stated in my first post) the command worked the way i wrote it when i used a real file (instead of /dev/null) as output destination. It is this inconsistency - the command reading all the files when a real file is the destination and not working, when the destination is /dev/null - i want to understand.

bakunin

Does your OS have the equivalent of truss on Solaris. When a program is run with truss system calls are output to STDERR. If you have something like that running tar with that and then redirecting the output to /dev/null and a regular file might show you why it ends so soon.