Weird Error With Tar

[nick_at_seakr]

I'm wondering if someone can help me out with this error I'm having with tar...it seems that the tar/gzip combination is not working correct. If I try to run the command:
tar tzf /path/to/archive.tar.gz

I get the following errors:
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

If I try, instead, to do:
zcat /path/to/archive.tar.gz | tar tf -

I get:
tar: Archive is compressed. Use -z option
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

So, it's almost as if gzip/zcat is not decompressing it correctly and is feeding it to tar in the compressed format. If I "gunzip" the archive, first, then use tar on the decompressed archive, it seems to work fine - however, this is not an ideal long-term work-around. I'm running this in a XEN domU, openSuSE 11.1. I have another openSuSE 11.1 machine that seems to work fine - just not sure why. Anyone have any hints?

-Nick

[ab@novell.com]

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Hash: SHA1

Perhaps your extension is wrong and it's another kind of compression.
Find out:

file /path/to/archive.tar.gz

Good luck.





nick at seakr wrote:
> I'm wondering if someone can help me out with this error I'm having with
> tar...it seems that the tar/gzip combination is not working correct. If
> I try to run the command:
> tar tzf /path/to/archive.tar.gz
>
> I get the following errors:
> tar: This does not look like a tar archive
> tar: Skipping to next header
> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
>
> If I try, instead, to do:
> zcat /path/to/archive.tar.gz | tar tf -
>
> I get:
> tar: Archive is compressed. Use -z option
> tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
>
> So, it's almost as if gzip/zcat is not decompressing it correctly and
> is feeding it to tar in the compressed format. If I "gunzip" the
> archive, first, then use tar on the decompressed archive, it seems to
> work fine - however, this is not an ideal long-term work-around. I'm
> running this in a XEN domU, openSuSE 11.1. I have another openSuSE 11.1
> machine that seems to work fine - just not sure why. Anyone have any
> hints?
>
> -Nick
>
>
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[nick_at_seakr]

See the part in the original post about how "gunzip" works to uncompress the archive - since this is the case, I'm fairly sure that the file is actually a .tar.gz file. Also, after I uncompress the file, I can recompress with gzip (gzip </path/to/archive>) and then try to run "tar tzf <archive>" or "zcat <archive>|tar tf -" and I get the same error messages.

Thanks for the response!
-Nick