TAR

[Richard Brak_1]

After using the
"tar xvf" command to extract a file to magneto optical (MO) disk, I recived the following error: TAR error! blocksize changed. Does anyone know what this means?
The MO disk seems to have all the information, but I don't like unexplained errors.

[Chris Vail · Accepted solution]

This is probably due to the different blocking factors between your source and destination disks. Your MO drive has one factor (usually some increment of 512 bytes) and your disk has another. This is just a warning error, so if I were you, I'd forget it.

You can avoid this in the future by finding out the blocksize of your MO disk, and then making your tar file with the -b flag (tar cvfb /dev/rmt/0 1024 /PATH/FILE).


Chris

[Richard Brak_1]

Thanks

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Richard,

You should take one further step to ease your mind - read the tarball.
Do a:

tar tvf filename

And make sure it completes w/o errors. All this does is read it - it writes nothing.
IF you get an error, suspect that the extract may be incomplete.
This can come from something simple, harmless - and dumb - like creating the tarball in the same dir the input files come from. Or it could indicate the tarball itself is corrupt...
Either way I'm like you - I *want* to know. Can you compare size/chksum of the dest files to the source?

Rgds,
Jeff