MinGW tar compression problem

I am unable to get the Mingw tar to work with compress files. It does not filter through the proper compression utility. However, tar will work if I manually uncompress the file first. I have tried in both the MSYS shell and Windows cmd. Has anyone had this problem or is it a MinGW bug?

For example, this does not work:

C:\Users\home\Desktop>tar -tzf wdiff-0.5.tar.gz
tar: Cannot use compressed or remote archives
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

C:\Users\home\Desktop>tar -t -Zgzip -f wdiff-0.5.tar.gz
tar: Cannot use compressed or remote archives
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

C:\Users\home\Desktop>tar -tf wdiff-0.5.tar.gz
tar: Hmm, this doesn't look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next file header
tar: Only read 6732 bytes from archive wdiff-0.5.tar.gz
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

However, this works:

gzip -d wdiff-0.5.tar.gz
tar -tf wdiff-0.5.tar

snmcdonald

Posted 2010-03-27T04:48:12.137

Reputation: 247

MinGW tar -tvzf "file" seems to be working now... just needed another reboot? – snmcdonald – 2010-03-27T16:55:52.670

Answers

some tar implementations do not include compressing/decompressing. thats just .. how they are configured / compiled / linked. i would not describe that as a bug.

you could combine the 2 steps involved in untarring a compressed tarball with something like this:

 % zcat in.tar.gz | tar xf -

 % zcat in.tar.gz | tar tf -

(zcat is usually just aliased to 'gzip -cd')

akira

Posted 2010-03-27T04:48:12.137

Reputation: 52 754

that's what this looks like to me, too. @Shiftbit, you should check the documentation for your tar to see if there are any notes about stuff that isn't compiled into the MinGW version. – quack quixote – 2010-03-27T11:57:41.813

I also had this problem. I used tar from cygwin to use -z switch in tar under Windows to resolve the issue.

l0pan

Posted 2010-03-27T04:48:12.137

Reputation: 121

This does not really answer the question. If you have a different question, you can ask it by clicking Ask Question. You can also add a bounty to draw more attention to this question once you have enough reputation.

– Jens Erat – 2014-06-22T19:54:57.553

The question is how to run "C:\Users\home\Desktop>c:\cygwin\bin\tar -tzf wdiff-0.5.tar.gz" without errors. The answer is to use tar from cygwin, i.e. to run smth like ""C:\Users\home\Desktop>c:\cygwin\bin\tar -tzf wdiff-0.5.tar.gz"" – l0pan – 2014-06-22T20:01:59.893

"I also have this problem" is a very strong indicator for a wrong use of answers. I slightly edited your answer to point out you actually have an answer to the question, and are not also searching for help. – Jens Erat – 2014-06-22T20:12:55.090