Re: recover data from corrupted tarball

[Eric Blake]

On 06/28/2011 08:02 AM, e-letter wrote:
> Readers,
> 
> A tar ball was received, created in m$ environment using 7zip. Using
> gnu/linux mandriva (m$ not available) The normal tar extract command
> was applied:
> 
> tar -xf ...
> 
> which was unsuccessful, returning command terminal response:
> 
> tar: This does not look like a tar archive
> tar: Skipping to next header
> tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
> 
> Using the tool 'file', the tar files are classified as 'data', of
> mime-type 'application/octet-stream', which I presume means that the
> the tar ball was formatted in error to some binary format.
> 
> Any advice to obtain the files in the tar ball?

This is the coreutils list, but coreutils is not responsible for tar,
nor even for file.  There's nothing coreutils can do for you.

You may have better luck for recovery ideas by asking on the tar mailing
list, but you should be aware that text-vs-binary corruption is not
always reversible.  It may be that your only recourse is to ask the
sender to resend the tarball but this time ensuring that they use binary
rather than text mode so that carriage returns aren't inserted to
corrupt the stream.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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