Tar error: Unexpected EOF in archive

linux, system-administration

Solution

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.

Problem

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?

Original source