10.1 Reliability

Ideally, when tar is creating an archive, it reads from a file system that is not being modified, and encounters no errors or inconsistencies while reading and writing. If this is the case, the archive should faithfully reflect what was read. Similarly, when extracting from an archive, ideally tar ideally encounters no errors and the extracted files faithfully reflect what was in the archive.

However, when reading or writing real-world file systems, several things can go wrong; these include permissions problems, corruption of data, and race conditions.

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