Help! calling tar from Python on Linux

[Carel Fellinger]

Preston Landers <prestonlanders at my-deja.com> wrote:
> In article <5loge456a9.fsf at eric.cnri.reston.va.us>,
>   Guido van Rossum <guido at cnri.reston.va.us> wrote:

>> My guess as to why he's getting the error that he's getting is that
>> tar somehow stops reading the gzip output before gzip is done.  Maybe
>> the rest of the tar output (if there's any) would be a clue.

> There was no additional output from tar.  I used the verbose flag, and
> it printed that it untarred' all the files, then it printed the message
> about recieving exit code of 1 from gzip.

Guido's remark shed a faint light on some almost extinct part of my brain
and suddenly I start remembering that once I encountered a similar behaviour
of tar and gzip. It had to do with excess bytes in the gzipped file, but
elas my memory is like it always was, a rusty colander, and no matter what
I try I can't reproduce it on my current machine. I also dimmly remember
something like it had to do with tar-balls from elsewhere, not locally made
ones. Well, this isn't going to help you much, is it. And I lack the old
Atari the try it out:(

-- 
groetjes, carel