bug#23315: Bug in gzip-1.7

[Jim Meyering]

On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 8:43 AM, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> merge 23314 23315
>
> On 04/19/2016 09:11 AM, Giorgio Ciucci wrote:
>> For each compressed file, eg. foo.gz, the command
>>
>>    a=$(gzip -lq foo.gz)
>>
>> produces on stderr the message
>>
>> "gzip: write error: Bad file descriptor"
>
> You're the second one to report this today.  The culprit is -l, and I
> already bisected the commit at fault.

Thank you both.

Note however that you really should not rely on gzip's -l option, due
to the format-imposed limit an input of size 4TiB or larger, the size
reported by --list (-l) will be reduced modulo 2^32, i.e., "wrong".

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=149775#10

If at all possible, I suggest that you switch to a superior
format/tool like lzma/xz. Not only do options like --list work as
expected with .xz files, but you'll find the actual compression ratios
are far higher.