Tar file format and viewing

[Erik]

Hello, I recently had a bzipped tar file. When unzipping it, I found that 1 
block was bad. I recovered the rest of the file and put them together. So I 
have a tar file which extracts fine until it hits the part that had the bzip 
block bad. After that I get messages like
home/users/admin/106th/maps.zip tar: Skipping to next file header
tar: Header contains "e\000\350\255\203I\275\b\371\030\021\001" where octal
off_t value expected
tar: Header contains "\022\214\373\226\234vY!\3106\260*" where octal time_t
value expected

This only occurs after the part that had the bad block. I'm not much of a 
programmer so I figured I would ask you about ways to recover the stuff after 
the missing part. From what I can tell the tar file is layed out like this 
(correct me if I'm wrong):
1. file name, path, owner, group, other attribs
2. data
3. checksum and end of file header thingie

If this is the way could a program be written that would just grab all the 
data from number 1 to number 3 and dump it to a file, not paying attention to 
the checksum at all? Or is there another way that I could recover my files 
from the tar file?

Thanks
Erik

-- 
Erik
address@hidden