UNTAR?

May 20, 2008
12,171
133
Syracuse, NY, USA
A friend salvaged my belongings from a 25 year-old Linux machine. I got them as vefatica.tar.gz (made today on Ubuntu). While in c:\users\vefatica\desktop\vefatica\, I issued "UNTAR vefatica.tar.gz" and got thousands (expected) messages like these.

Code:
=> C:\Users\vefatica\Desktop\vefatica\bookmarks.xml
=> C:\Users\vefatica\Desktop\vefatica\konq_history
=> C:\Users\vefatica\Desktop\vefatica\bookmarks.xml.tbcache

But when it was all over all I had in C:\Users\vefatica\Desktop\vefatica\ was a deeper-still vefatica directory containing these few EMPTY directories.

Code:
 Directory of  C:\Users\vefatica\Desktop\vefatica\vefatica\*

2018-09-24  20:41         <DIR>    .
2018-09-24  20:41         <DIR>    ..
2018-09-24  20:41         <DIR>    .emacs.d
2018-09-24  20:41         <DIR>    .gnome
2018-09-24  20:41         <DIR>    .gnome-desktop
2018-09-24  20:41         <DIR>    .lftp
2018-09-24  20:41         <DIR>    .openoffice
2018-09-24  20:41         <DIR>    .xfm
2018-09-24  20:41         <DIR>    mail
2018-09-24  20:41         <DIR>    News
                   0 bytes in 0 files and 10 dirs
 
May 20, 2008
12,171
133
Syracuse, NY, USA
I should add that the archive was originally named vefatica.tgz. When I tried to UNTAR it I got
Code:
c:\users\vefatica\desktop\vefatica> untar vefatica.tgz
TCC: Error in archive C:\Users\vefatica\Desktop\vefatica\vefatica.tgz :
  A numeric field in the header contains non-numeric data.
 
May 20, 2008
12,171
133
Syracuse, NY, USA
You probably should have said UNTAR /D.
With /d I get the same error when the file is named vefatica.tgz. When it's named vafetica.tar.gz, I get the 1998 messages I mentioned earlier. But when it's over, I have only
Code:
c:\users\vefatica\desktop\vefatica> dir /u2 vefatica\

 Volume in drive C is unlabeled    Serial number is b813:1d21
          10,539,236 bytes in 15 files and 10 dirs    10,575,872 bytes allocated
       1,765,195,776 bytes free

There really should be close to 2000 files. I have unzipped it successfully (and completely) on Win10/WSL
 
May 20, 2008
12,171
133
Syracuse, NY, USA
Oops! I should have done this (below). But there should be a lot more. The compressed archive is nearly 50 MB. I can make it available to you. I don't think there's anything private or damning (or dirty) in it.
Code:
c:\users\vefatica\desktop\vefatica> dir /s /u2 vefatica\

 Volume in drive C is unlabeled    Serial number is b813:1d21

    Total for:  C:\Users\vefatica\Desktop\vefatica\vefatica\
          10,577,873 bytes in 39 files and 38 dirs    10,690,560 bytes allocated
       1,765,064,704 bytes free
 
May 20, 2008
12,171
133
Syracuse, NY, USA
I don't know. 7za.exe (v 9.20, 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov) just happens to be what I have.
I just got a newer one (v 18.05, 2018). The exe is 7z.exe. It unzipped and extracted (correctly, apparently) the file in question (in two steps). The older one might have done that; I didn't try.
 

rconn

Administrator
Staff member
May 14, 2008
12,557
167
The problem with TCC / UNTAR is that the tar file has symlinks, which the Ipworks compression library does not support. The library was defaulting to ignoring the symlink errors, which made it go off the rails shortly thereafter. I made a change for the next build to treat the symlink error as a fatal error.
 
Aug 23, 2010
688
9
Normal (read: community accepted) behavior on systems that not readily support symlinks is to ignore them.
Not fail hard.
 
Aug 23, 2010
688
9
It did NOT fail. It worked as intended. Created everything it could and should. If there were warnings (due to unsupported features), it's not enough of a reason to crash.