tar -C foo -c . | tar -C bar -x ends up with nothing on read errors

[Marcin Owsiany]

Package: tar
Version: 1.15.1-2ubuntu2.2
Severity: normal

I was hoping to save what I can from a disk which starts to show read
errors, by using a command like:

sudo tar --ignore-failed-read  -C /media/data_big -cv -f - . | sudo tar -C /mnt -x -f -

Unfortunately, after the reading tar encountered about four unreadable
files, the two processes got desynchronized somehow, and stracing the
receiver tar revealed that it did nothing but read lots of data from
standard input.  As a result, nothing got to the destination disk after
the read errors were encountered.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers dapper-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'dapper-updates'), (500, 'dapper-security'), (500, 'dapper')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.15-29-686
Locale: LANG=pl_PL.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=pl_PL.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages tar depends on:
ii  libc6                  2.3.6-0ubuntu20.5 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an

tar recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information

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