6 Using gzip on tapes

When writing compressed data to a tape, it is generally necessary to pad the output with zeroes up to a block boundary. When the data is read and the whole block is passed to gunzip for decompression, gunzip detects that there is extra trailing garbage after the compressed data and emits a warning by default if the garbage contains nonzero bytes. You have to use the ‘--quiet’ option to suppress the warning. This option can be set in the GZIP environment variable, as in:

for sh:    GZIP="-q"  tar -xfz --block-compress /dev/rst0
for csh:   (setenv GZIP "-q"; tar -xfz --block-compress /dev/rst0)

In the above example, gzip is invoked implicitly by the ‘-z’ option of GNU tar. Make sure that the same block size (‘-b’ option of tar) is used for reading and writing compressed data on tapes. (This example assumes you are using the GNU version of tar.)

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