[Bug-tar] gnu tar does not recover when blocks in archive are defective

[Soeren Sonnenburg]

Dear all,

I was using tar 1.19 and trying to extract a .tar.bz2 which was
defective. So I had to manually use bzip2recover ending up with several
thousands of .bz2 files of which most could be decompressed. Now
concatenating all the files (correct order!) lead to a ``recovered.tar''
archive. However when trying to extract the archive tar fails as soon as
the first defective header is found. I was expecting tar to try as hard
as possible to recover the remaining files by simply ignoring the junk
preceding the next valid header.

So using the perl script from
http://www.bestsolution.at/support/console/repair_tar_archives.html.en

I managed to recover further parts by tail -n +NNNNNN | tar xf - ... but
whenever a defective part appeared I had to restart the procedure and
check for the next file...

Did I miss an option, did this never work or is it just broken in newer
versions of gnutar?

Soeren

PS: I tried to file this as a bug report but gnu tar does not accept
bug reports (bug or feature?).