Is there a way to diagnose a tar file when, on extract, files are missing but no errors are given?

Posted by ljvillanueva on Super User See other posts from Super User or by ljvillanueva
Published on 2010-08-03T17:23:08Z Indexed on 2010/12/21 20:56 UTC
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linux

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tar

I have tar files where I archive about 250 files, each about 80 Mb, without compression. In a few cases tar is only returning some of the files. For example, when doing an extract of the file using:

tar -xvf 356.tar

I got only 103 files, when it should return 255 files, but tar does not give me an error. Furthermore, the tar archive is 15.8 Gb while the extracted folder is just 6.4 Gb. The tar files were created using

tar -cvf 356.tar 356

where 356 is the name of the folder.

All the steps where done in the same machines, under Ubuntu 6 and newer. Any ideas if there is a way to recover the files that are not being extracted?

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