Re: tar zxvf won't work with Redhat generated compressed tar file

[Eric Blake <eblake at redhat dot com>]

On 04/20/2015 01:10 PM, Joi L. Ellis wrote:
> 
> Note that some flavors of tar don't have a very powerful compression library, and some don't have one at all.  For those old ones you may be forced to use gunzip to get the tarball into a form the old tar understands.  (My ancient CentOS box has it, though.)

GNU tar does NOT use compression libraries; rather, it shells out (via
an equivalent to popen()) to an external program.  If you tell tar which
format a file was compressed in, it should try to use that compression
utility without questions; if you omit the compression format, tar knows
enough magic numbers to shell out to the most common default decompressors.

But one thing that MAY be happening is if a newer gzip is at play.
Upstream has reports of tar failing if $GZIP is set in the environment,
since newer gzip explicitly warns about this setup, and the warning may
interfere with tar's use of the output stream from the resulting
decompression:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2015-03/msg00006.html

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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