Untar a file on Solaris reports - tar: directory checksum error

Question

Hi I am trying to untar a compressed file on a Solaris server. I run the command

tar xvf 4.56_release.tar.gz

But this reports the following error

tar: directory checksum error

Initially I thought it was a bad download so I re-downloaded the file (actually a different version) and it reports the same error. Un-compressing and un-tar'ing it on Linux on a Linux server works fine.

Any ideas what I am doing wrong.

Answer 1

The .tar.gz is the hint for what you are doing wrong - you are not uncompressing it first. If your version of tar supports it, you can use the -z flag to specify it is compressed with gzip:

tar -xzvf 4.56_release.tar.gz

Otherwise, you'll have to gunzip it manually:

gunzip -c 4.56_release.tar.gz | tar xvf -

(The reason it works on Linux is probably that is has a newer/different version which automagically detects the compression)

Answer 2

If you have a '.tar.bz2' type of archive file and neither of the above options worked ('-z' is not supported for your version of 'tar'), you can use:

bzip2 -d your_file.tar.bz2

to decompress, then use tar:

tar -xvf your_file.tar

Taken from here: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/solaris-opensolaris-20/how-to-unpack-a-tar-bz2-file-654772/