Exceptions such as disk full during extraction cause tarfile to leak file handles. Besides being messy, it causes real problems if, for example, the target file is on a mount that should be unmounted before the program exits - in this case, the unmount will fail as there are still open file handles.

Simplest solution I can see is to change:

    def makefile(self, tarinfo, targetpath):
        """Make a file called targetpath.
        """
        source = self.extractfile(tarinfo)
        target = bltn_open(targetpath, "wb")
        copyfileobj(source, target)
        source.close()
        target.close()

to this:

    def makefile(self, tarinfo, targetpath):
        """Make a file called targetpath.
        """
        source = self.extractfile(tarinfo)
        try:
            with open(targetpath, "wb") as target:
                shutil.copyfileobj(source, target)
        finally:
            source.close()

sorry, replace 'open' with 'bltn_open' in the above comment - no need to change it.

Issue16408 is similar issue for zipfile.

Would "with source = self.extractfile(tarinfo):" work?

> Would "with source = self.extractfile(tarinfo):" work?

No.  extractfile() can return an instance of custom class.  But in 3.x this not 
used at all.

Here are patches for 2.7 and 3.x.

LGTM

New changeset b7bdc0b3c2fe by Andrew Svetlov in branch '3.2':
Issue #16477: Close tarfile internal handlers in case of exception.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/b7bdc0b3c2fe

New changeset 80749ddc30b6 by Andrew Svetlov in branch '3.3':
Merge issue #16477: Close tarfile internal handlers in case of exception.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/80749ddc30b6

New changeset 2d887691a99b by Andrew Svetlov in branch 'default':
Merge issue #16477: Close tarfile internal handlers in case of exception.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/2d887691a99b

New changeset ea4bdf5a2e69 by Andrew Svetlov in branch '2.7':
Issue #16477: Close tarfile internal handlers in case of exception.
http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/ea4bdf5a2e69

Fixed. Thanks, Serhiy