Linux – tar padding with zeros

linuxtar

When performing a tar on a bz2 compressed file I am encountering the following error,

tar: dump.sql: File shrank by 19573448400 bytes; padding with zeros

Can anyone point what might be causing this issue ?

Thanks.

Best Answer

It's not an error. It's INFO.

I'm willing to bet you're compressing/decompressing a Virtual Machine image, or otherwise sparsely-allocated file.

Bzip2 has detected that the file is mostly zeroes, and compressed it so that they're not there in the compressed file.

This is the difference between actual size and apparent size of sparse files.

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Linux – How to extract from this tar file when the file may be corrupt

You could try your extract with the -i option to ignore zeros:

The --ignore-zeros (-i) option causes tar to ignore blocks of zeros in
the archive. Normally a block of zeros indicates the end of the archive,
but when reading a damaged archive, or one which was created by cat-ing
several archives together, this option allows tar to read the entire
archive. This option is not on by default because many versions of tar
write garbage after the zeroed blocks.

Tar: How to create a tar file with arbitrary leading directories w/o ‘cd’ing to parent dir

tar -C changes directory

tar -C /home/user1/ -cvzf dir1.tar.gz dir1

btw, handy one for keeping track of changing directories... use pushd and popd.

pushd .
cd /home/user1
tar cvfz dir1.tar.gz
popd

Best Answer

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