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)