tar:broken pipe

[Dave Bunting]

I sense a patch problem here... somebody help!!!!
tar tvf /dev/rmt/0m sometimes is successful and somtimes produces:
tar: blocksize=0; broken pipe?
any suggestions?

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

I've had a look at the patches for you:

HPUX 10.20 PHCO_15336
HPUX 11 PHCO_20028

I've not seen this error for quite a
while, so the first thing I suggest is
check these out first.... You may have
answered your question...

Good Luck
-Michael

[Animesh Chakraborty]

Hi,
Try
# tar tvf /dev/rmt/0mn
http://us-support.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=7d600b491a0e1c2b9d/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000007950095
http://us-support.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=7d600b491a0e1c2b9d/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000006434182

http://us-support.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=7d600b491a0e1c2b9d/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000006402302
http://us-support.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=7d600b491a0e1c2b9d/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000038250707

Best of luck
Animesh

[Dave Bunting]

Thanks for the help guys... but I have been to those urls... seen the patch. broken pipe is an exit 3 code, right?
Do you know any specific messages wherein exit 3 was discussed? thanks again...

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

A broken pipe is an error 32, at least
as far as Unix is concerned, when you
were running the tar command did it
display any error numbers? other than
'broken pipe' ?

If you have a look in
/usr/include/sys/errno.h this lists the
standard Unix error messages-numbers.

-Michael

[Dave Bunting]

actually i am receiving:
"blocksize=0; broken pipe ?" msg
it is intermittent, sometimes, tar tvf is ok, sometimes broken pipe...
any more ideas?
Thanks

[Michael Tully]

This is very interesting. Does this only occur when you try an read from the tape drive? Or does it happen when you read from a tar archive on your disk? Can you successfully write to tape and or disk?
-Michael

[Dave Bunting]

Intermittently it happens, on the first tar tvf command it will produce a 'broken pipe' msg but on the succeeding tar tvf commands it will go through and tar command will successfully execute. I think you this might interest you... ;-) the tar command is included in an SQL script...
{-( Thanks

[Michael Tully · Accepted solution]

What happens if you only run tar commands
on their own excluding any sql??
Does the error message get produced during
any attempt? If it does not, then we have
to look at the sql itself. Perhaps when
some of the data is 'parsing' that the 'tar'
falls over. You could see what happens if
you substitute the tape device to a file on
disk to see if it makes any diffenence.
-Michael

[Dave Bunting]

tar, when executed on command line produces no errors... possibly an error within the SQL script (sad to say, I am not that familiar with SQL scripting)will try your suggestion to use the disk.
Thanks again...

[Animesh Chakraborty]

Hi,
Beside that I will also suggest you to clean the tape drive on regular basis.
You may also think of replacing the tape drive
to confirm (if possible).



Regards
Animesh

[Nial Gunn]

Dave,

I am experiencing a very similar problem and have also noticed that when I try to type the pipe character (i.e. | ) in a terminal window, I get a funny character returned. I don't think that it is able to interpret the | character correctly and it may be something to do with regional settings or something like that. Can you use the | character from the command line by running a simple command such as

ls | more

On my machine, this returns an error. The character that appears when I press the | key is ^?? .