On 04/20/2015 01:10 PM, Joi L. Ellis wrote: > > Note that some flavors of tar don't have a very powerful compression library, > and some don't have one at all. For those old ones you may be forced to use > gunzip to get the tarball into a form the old tar understands. (My ancient > CentOS box has it, though.)
GNU tar does NOT use compression libraries; rather, it shells out (via an equivalent to popen()) to an external program. If you tell tar which format a file was compressed in, it should try to use that compression utility without questions; if you omit the compression format, tar knows enough magic numbers to shell out to the most common default decompressors. But one thing that MAY be happening is if a newer gzip is at play. Upstream has reports of tar failing if $GZIP is set in the environment, since newer gzip explicitly warns about this setup, and the warning may interfere with tar's use of the output stream from the resulting decompression: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-tar/2015-03/msg00006.html -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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