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

[Paul Eggert]

Alexis Huxley <address@hidden> writes:

> 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

This means you fixed one header, but the next one was busted.
Each header has a checksum, so most random errors like that are caught.

I'm afraid that it doesn't look good for your data.

> this confirms that the record length is 512 bytes, and not 1024

Yes.

> 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.

Normally, sizes are expressed in octal text.  The tar.h file of the
tar source code will tell you where they are.