Re: [Help-tar] Re: Can't extract - get "Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers"

[Alexis Huxley]

> One thing just came to my mind while reading the dump you sent. There
> doesn't seem to be an entry for the ./doc/ directory in your tar
> archive. Isn't is suspicious? Normally, tar would automatically add any
> directory prior to the files contained in this directory, when creating
> the archive.
> 
> So I start wondering if the strange second entry ".#a`(" (2e 23 61 60
> 28 04) couldn't in fact be that missing directory, "./doc/". That
> would explain this additional 512-byte block. And the string length
> matches...
> 
> Or course I might as well be completely wrong, but you could try editing
> the dump file and write "./doc/" at 0x200, and see what happens. IMHO
> that's worth the try.

Wow ... thanks, that helped somewhat:

dione$ tar tvf tape.dump.X 
drwx------ alexis/alexis     0 2003-08-04 21:49:51 ./
drwx------ alexis/alexis     0 2003-08-04 21:48:14 ./doc/
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
dione$ 

Before it only produced the "./" line, so this is an improvement. Okay, but
then this confirms that the record length is 512 bytes, and not 1024; I'll
try playing with my perl extraction script some more, but I'll still
confused about how I get the size of the later file.

Alexis