"tar: Unrecognized archive format" 9.0 RELEASE only

lubos · Jan 18, 2012

Hello,

I backed up some files on a floppy from a 8.2 RELEASE system:
# tar -cf /dev/fd0 ./*

Listing archive contents or extracting files on another 8.2 RELEASE system, there is no problem:
# tar -tf /dev/fd0

Unfortunately, trying this on a 9.0 RELEASE system returns:

Code:

tar: Unrecognized archive format
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.

Does anyone know the cause? Thank you in advance,

Lubos

kientzle@ · Jan 26, 2012

Can you email me the first few kB of that file? (kientzle@freebsd.org)
# dd if=/dev/fd0 of=sample.data bs=1k count=8

If you can't mail an attachment for some reason, I can probably puzzle it out from a hex dump:
# dd if =/dev/fd0 bs=1k count=2 | hd

Cheers,

Tim

kientzle@ · Jan 27, 2012

Thanks for sending that data. I've fed it through a couple of bsdtar versions and haven't managed to get anything to break for me.

So I suspect this is a problem with bsdtar reading directly from the floppy. (Unfortunately, I don't have any floppy drives handy to test with.)

Please try this and let me know if it makes a difference:

# dd if=/dev/fd0 bs=1k | tar tf -

If it does, I'll take a look at tar's I/O code to see if there are any obvious changes from 8.2 to 9.0 that would explain this.

lubos · Jan 27, 2012

kientzle@ said:
Please try this and let me know if it makes a difference ...

No, the same error:

Code:

tar: Unrecognized archive format.

I tried it even on the 8.2 system for the sake of certainty and there was no problem.

wblock@ · Jan 28, 2012

It might be interesting to see the output of
% which tar
% tar --help

lubos · Jan 30, 2012

wblock@ said:
It might be interesting to see the output of
% which tar
% tar --help

I am sorry, but I don't see your point... There must be an inner difference in 9.0's tar, because all erroneous inputs are processed properly with 8.2's tar.

wblock@ · Jan 30, 2012

To make sure that it really is FreeBSD 9.0's tar and not some other tar or something else that got ahead of it on the path.

lubos · Jan 30, 2012

wblock@ said:
To make sure that it really is FreeBSD 9.0's tar and not some other tar or something else that got ahead of it on the path.

Code:

bsdtar 2.8.4 - libarchive 2.8.4

For reference, the working 8.2's tar is:

Code:

bsdtar 2.7.0 - libarchive 2.7.0