[TriLUG] Strange tar problem

[Glenn Hennessee]

I ran into a strange problem with tar that I did finally fix but exactly 
what was the problem is still unknown to me.

I was using tar to backup up to tape a user's home directory. There is 
approximately 850MB in the directory including a few files with names 
that are using non-ascii characters. The backup would go and at the end 
I would get an error message of "tar: Error exit delayed from previous 
errors". No indication of what the problem was. After talking to a 
friend he and I tried various things to try and track down the problem. 
There were no symlinks in the users folder. We could successfully tar 
the directory to /dev/null and to a file on the system but not to 
/dev/st0. I was able to tar everything else I tried to the tape though. 
Finally in desperation I copied his entire directory to /tmp with the 
idea of deleting out files/folders until I found the file with the 
problem BUT before deleting anything I ran tar to the tape and it worked 
without any errors. So what I did was copy the folder to /tmp, rename 
the original, copy back from /tmp and chown the folder to the user. I'll 
delete the renamed, orignal folder later.

Does anyone have any idea what was going on that would prevent tar to 
tape from working but not /dev/null or a tar file that would be fixed in 
a copy operation?

glenn