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Alex
Asked: 2011-02-16 09:38:29 +0800 CST

Repair gzipped tar

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I have a pretty large(50Gb) tar.gz file that I can't untar anymore. Error that I am getting is this:

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Is there any way to repair broken tar.gz?

UPDATE: Output of file command:

$ file projects.tgz 
projects.tgz: POSIX tar archive (GNU)
gzip

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Your file is an uncompressed tarball. The extension .tgz is misleading, you might want to give the file a better extension, like .tar:

    mv projects.tgz projects.tar

    You've possibly tried to extract the file by running:

    tar xzvf projects.tar

    But the correct way to extract the tarball is:

    tar xvf projects.tar

    Options explained:

    • x: extract
    • z: GZip compressed (which is not the case in your file, so it should be removed for now)
    • f: file (required next argument to be the filename of the archive)
    • v: Be verbose (show file names while extracting).

    See the manual page on tar for more information about this command.

    • 11

  2. Rename projects.tgz to projects.tar. Then you will be able to untar the archive via Nautilus for instance.

    • 1