I reported this bug in launchpad some years ago, but I see no indication that the launchpad people forwarded it upstream, so I'm doing it now myself. The bug was first noticed with an older version of tar, but as far as I can tell, it persists with 1.23.
Tar appears unable to uncompress a .Z file (produced with the "compress" utility) without the "compress" binary being present on the system. This should not be necessary because "gzip" is (and always has been) quite capable of uncompressing compress-ed binaries. To repeat: 1. obtain a .tar.Z file, e.g. ftp://aixpdslib.seas.ucla.edu/pub/ldd/RISC/5.1/exec/ldd.1.0.tar.Z 2. Execute: tar xf ldd.1.0.tar.Z Expected result: the tar file is uncompressed. Actual result: error: tar: compress: Cannot exec: No such file or directory tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now tar: Child returned status 2 tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors As a workaround, one can add the "z" flag to force the use of gunzip for decompression. However, the "z" flag should not be necessary and is confusing, since tar is obviously quite capable of recognizing the format.
