I recently built a tarball by using the command line
cd /tmp;tar -zcf home-dir.tgz /home/bill
and then writing /tmp/home-dir.tgz to CD.
When I later copied the file from CD to a working dir and attempted to
unpack it, I got the following result:
gunzip -c home-dir.tgz | tar xf -
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Archive contains
`\016\000\0001\004\001\002\236\016\000\000\001'
where numeric off_t value expected
tar: Archive contains `\'$\003\004$\036#\020' where numeric
mode_t value expected
tar: Archive contains `\002\237\016\000\000;\n\020\001*\016'
where numeric time_t value expected
tar: Archive contains `!\000\000\000\213=%'
where numeric major_t value expected
tar: Archive contains `\001\000\0001\r\001\002\234'
where numeric uid_t value expected
tar: Archive contains `\016\000\000(\001\001\002\235'
where numeric gid_t value expected
: implausibly old time stamp 1969-12-31 17:59:59
tar: Skipping to next header
gunzip: home-dir.tgz: invalid compressed data--crc error
gunzip: home-dir.tgz: invalid compressed data--length error
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
The tar file isn't completely corrupted since the directory "bill" was
created and part of a subtree was built within it.
The two gunzip errors make me suspect numeric overflow. The command
line
gunzip -l home-dir.tgz
resulted in
compressed uncompr. ratio uncompressed_name
439902443 1049169920 58.0% home-dir.tar
Was the tar file too large for gzip? Is there any hope of recovery?
By the way, I had a slightly smaller tarball made a week earlier that
generated the same gunzip errors but no tar errors when I tried to
unpack it. Is there any hope of recovering it?
The tar version is 1.14, the gunzip version is 1.2.4, I built the
tarballs under Mandrake 9.1 and tried to unpack them under Mandriva
10.1.
Thanks, and hoping against hope,
-- Bill Wood
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