bin/pax and gzip behavior

Hi all,
after a restless night, the following question: Why doesn't pax wait for the compress program e.g. gzip to finish before exiting itself? I'm not sure wether this a bug or feature, but I suppose its the former.

I run into it by trying to use tla with the native tar. It does principally the following:
- create scratch area

• tar+gzip scratch area
• copy tarball to other directory. What happens now is, tar/pax exits, gzip is still writing the file, the tla just copys the gzip header. This is reproducible using "touch test; tar czf test.tar test && ls -l test.tar". In some cases it will show you a zero byte file. Using the attached patch the bug seems solved.

Regards,
Joerg

--- ar_io.c.orig	Tue Jun  3 01:32:08 2003
+++ ar_io.c	Wed Aug 27 02:10:15 2003
@@ -336,15 +336,29 @@
 	/*
 	 * for a quick extract/list, pax frequently exits before the child
 	 * process is done
+	 *
+	 * this is safe as long as the archive is not modified by the child
+	 * process
 	 */
 	if ((act == LIST || act == EXTRACT) && nflag && zpid > 0) {
 		int status;
 		kill(zpid, SIGINT);
 		waitpid(zpid, &status, 0);
+		zpid = -1;
 	}
 
 	(void)close(arfd);
 
+	/*
+	 * if there is still a child, pax should not exit before the child
+	 * process is done to ensure data integrity
+	 */
+	if (zpid > 0)
+	{
+		int status;
+		waitpid(zpid, &status, 0);	
+	}
+
 	if (vflag && (artyp == ISTAPE)) {
 		(void)fputs("done.\n", listf);
 		vfpart = 0;