[Help-tar] Does GNU tar close its input pipe before seeing EOF on it?

[Ersek, Laszlo]

Dear GNU tar Maintainer,

if you can find the time, please read the blog post [0] and the related 
(not too long) reddit thread [1]. The question is:

Does GNU tar (and if so, under what circumstances) close its input pipe 
before seeing EOF on it?

The input pipe in question can be under stdin, created by the shell, as in

$ filter -d <input | tar -x

or it can be created by tar itself, as in

$ tar --use=filter -x <input


The background point of interest is whether GNU tar can make the filter 
see a SIGPIPE / EPIPE by breaking its output pipe, even though GNU tar 
does not discover any problems with the tar stream it reads from the pipe 
(or with the filesystem it works with).


Thank you very much,
lacos

[0] http://blog.nelhage.com/archives/150
[1] 
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b7djd/stuff_like_this_makes_me_hate_python_subtle_bugs