# Followup to "A Very Subtle Bug"

DevFeed: [Followup to "A Very Subtle Bug"](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/followup-to-a-very-subtle-bug-21901.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.nelhage.com/2010/03/followup-to-a-very-subtle-bug/>)

Author: Nelson Elhage

Published: 2010-03-03T13:45:11Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Nelson Elhage](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/nelson-elhage.md>)

Topics: [bug](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/bug.md>), [race-condition](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/race-condition.md>)

Tags: [bug](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/bug.md>), [race-condition](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/race-condition.md>), [reddit](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/reddit.md>)

## AI overview

A follow-up investigates why tar can read to the end of a tarball and how a narrow race condition can cause SIGPIPE or EPIPE when tar closes an input pipe before all remaining blocks are written. It also notes that the reported bug was fixed in GNU tar.

## Source excerpt

After my previous post got posted to reddit, there was a bunch of interesting discussion there about some details I'd handwaved over. This is a quick followup on some the investigation that various people carried out, and the conclusions they reached. In the reddit thread, lacos/lbzip2 objected that in his experiments, he didn't see tar closing the input pipe before it was done reading the file, and so questioned where the SIGPIPE/EPIPE was coming from in the first place.