tar error

[jedd]

hello all
i am having problems with a tar archive. i was able to extract from tape,with no problems. now i am extracting, but it is in tar.gz format. so i use tar -zxvf, which works fine. but i get the following errors:
Archive contains obsolescent base 64 headers,
invalid compressed data - CRC Error
invalid compressed data - Length Error
is it possible to skip this certain file and go to the next one. i want to find out the rest of the archive. i use tar -tvf , but that also results in the error above. do i need a new version of tar. how do i check for version of tar and where to get the latest one. i am using United Linux 1.0. when i try to gunzip it, i get the same errors. hopefully this all makes sense

[Mark Grant]

This is a relatively common problem that nobody seems to have a definitive answer for. It seems that it might have something to do with HPUX tar and the way it saved user id's in the file if it is a particularly large user id. Though it can also be a bug in the GNU implementation of tar and the way it stores uid's. It depends how you look at it.

You are probably going to struggle to skip this file and move on to the next but it it actually possible if you uncompress the tar file first and then actually try and edit out the bits you want. It's not a pleasant task and you might be terr off just trying to get the latest GNU tar on all the systems that you are getting your tar file from.

[Paul R. Dittrich]

You might try the -o switch for V7 format instead of ANSI.

HTH,
Paul

[Steven E. Protter]

I'm assuming the -z option is supposed to handle the fact that the file is in gzip format.

I've never done it that way.

I gunzip and then tar xvf

Will it make a difference? I don't know.

This could be a version compabatility issue between the system that made the tar and your system.

Every once in a while I have to remember to go out and upgrade utilities like gzip and tar, because that doesn't happen autmatically.

SEP

[K.C. Chan]

Can u try gunziping it first then taring it off or try "file ", just to be sure. If unzipping it failed maybe you can look into other unzip utils that is compatible with gzip/gunzip. Just a thought.