tarfile doesn't seem to return any error or raise any exception when an
extraction fills up the disk, making it hard to use safely. Both
extractall and extract suffer from this problem. I'm using CentOS 5.2
and python 2.6.2.

The TarFile constructor (as well as tarfile.open) takes an errorlevel
keyword argument. See
http://docs.python.org/dev/library/tarfile.html#tarfile-objects

I quote: "If errorlevel is 0, all errors are ignored when using
TarFile.extract(). Nevertheless, they appear as error messages in the
debug output, when debugging is enabled. If 1, all fatal errors are
raised as OSError or IOError exceptions. If 2, all non-fatal errors are
raised as TarError exceptions as well."

Hope that helps.

Yes, thanks errorlevel works as expected, and errors are correctly
generated. It's quite unintuitive to ignore fatal errors by default
however.

I changed the default value for the errorlevel argument, so that fatal
errors are now raised as regular exceptions by default (trunk: r76780,
py3k: r76782). Thank you very much for bringing up this issue.