Computer trivia

This post is about a very common mistake while untarring in Linux. I personally have committed this mistake many times and seen people doing this.

Suppose you have a file filename.tar. The most common way to try to untar this file is

                                                “tar -zxvf filename.tar”

Some times this gives the following error.
gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

When a file has .tar extension, it means that the file is either zipped or zipped and compressed. The command we typed above is for files that are zipped and compressed. However some times files are only zipped and not compressed. In that case the above error is thrown.

So, the command to untar tarballs that are only zipped and not compressed is

                                       “tar -xvf filename.tar”

Try this and there will not be any problem.

Comments RSS