Tar error: Unexpected EOF in archive

linux sysadmin
Cyrille picture Cyrille · Aug 25, 2009 · Viewed 101.4k times · Source

I tar a directory full of JPEG images: 

tar cvfz myarchive.tar.gz mydirectory

When I untar the archive: 

tar xvfz myarchive.tar.gz

I get an error:

tar: Unexpected EOF in archive

Looking at the output, it fails in the middle of one particular JPEG image.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer

paxdiablo picture paxdiablo · Aug 25, 2009

Interesting. I have a few questions which may point out the problem.

1/ Are you untarring on the same platform as you're tarring on? They may be different versions of tar (e.g., GNU and old-unix)? If they're different, can you untar on the same box you tarred on?

2/ What happens when you simply gunzip myarchive.tar.gz? Does that work? Maybe your file is being corrupted/truncated. I'm assuming you would notice if the compression generated errors, yes?

Based on the GNU tar source, it will only print that message if find_next_block() returns 0 prematurely which is usually caused by truncated archive.

Related questions

How to find out what group a given user has?

In Unix/Linux, how do you find out what group a given user is in via command line?

Read More
Best practice to run Linux service as a different user

Services default to starting as root at boot time on my RHEL box. If I recall correctly, the same is true for other Linux distros which use the init scripts in /etc/init.d. What do you think is the …

Read More
Crontab Day of the Week syntax

In crontab does the Day of the Week field run from 0 - 6 or 1 -7? I am seeing conflicting information on this. wikipedia states 0-6 and other sites I have seen are 1-7. Also what would be the implication or either …

Read More