Tar error Unexpected EOF in archive

Question

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

User · Answer

I had a similar error  but in my case the cause was file renaming  I was creating a gzipped file file1 tar gz and repeatedly updating it in another tarfile with tar -uvf   combined tar   file1 tar gz  I got the unexpected EOF error when after untarring combined tar and trying to untar file1 tar gz   I noticed there was a difference in the output of file before and after tarring    file file1 tar gz file1 tar gz  gzip compressed data  was  file1 tar   last modified  Mon Jul 29 12 00 00 2019  from Unix    tar xvf combined tar  file file1 tar gz file1 tar gz  gzip compressed data  was  file old tar   last modified  Mon Jul 29 12 00 00 2019  from Unix   So  it appears that the file had a different name when I originally created combined tar  and using the tar update function doesn t overwrite the metadata for the gzipped filename  The solution was to recreate combined tar from scratch instead of updating it   I still don t know exactly what happened  since changing the name of a gzipped file doesn t normally break it

User · Answer

May be you have ftped the file in ascii mode instead of binary mode   If not  this might help    gunzip myarchive tar gz  And then untar the resulting tar file using   tar xvf myarchive tar  Hope this helps

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

I had a similar problem with truncated tar files being produced by a cron job and redirecting standard out to a file fixed the issue   From talking to a colleague  cron creates a pipe and limits the amount of output that can be sent to standard out  I fixed mine by removing -v from my tar command  making it much less verbose and keeping the error output in the same spot as the rest of my cron jobs  If you need the verbose tar output  you ll need to redirect to a file  though

User · Answer

In my case  I had started untar before the uploading of the tar file was complete

[linux] Tar error: Unexpected EOF in archive

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