Deletion operation on .tar file results in "killed" being printed and tar file being incomplete.

Question

I am creating a .tar file base on a docker container and need to update one file (/etc/hosts). Therefore I am running the following commands:

tar --delete -f data.tar etc/hoststar --update -f data.tar etc/hosts

The output I get from the pipeline is the following (and this results in am unfinished tar file):

What could be the issue here?

Here you can see a more detailed screenshots of the steps undertaken:

Hannes Kuchelmeister_60egy1 · Answer

I managed to reduce memory usage by piping docker container export directly into tar --delete like this:

# export container and delete hosts file
docker container export release-container | tar --delete etc/hosts > "$tmp_dir"/data.tar

# add new hosts file:
tar --append -v -f data.tar etc/hosts

gzip "$tmp_dir"/data.tar

Patrik S · Answer

Hello @Hannes Kuchelmeister ,

If you are using Linux Docker self-hosted runners, they can be configured to use 1x, 2x, 3x and 4x which will result in 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB of memory allocated to the runner respectively. It's important to note that the runner's host machine should have that memory available.

Another option you might want to try is using Linux Shell runners. These runners are executed directly in a terminal session of Linux (with no docker involved) and can use the total resources available for the host. You can check the instructions in Setup Linux shell runner for details on how to install and use a Linux shell runner.

Thank you, @Hannes Kuchelmeister !

Patrik S

Hannes Kuchelmeister_60egy1 · Answer

Hi Theodora,

thank you for your reply. Using the commands provided in (1) I was able to figure out that the memory used by tar --delete is more than the runners have. Unfortunately also the 2x runners run out of memory. This is the reason why I did not early notice that this is the issue.

Unfortunately for now I do not have a real solution to this issue yet.