# tar: Special header too large error



## AndyUKG (Jan 8, 2020)

Hi,

  I'm piping a bzip2 compressed tar file into tar on FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE and seeing this error. Anyone any idea what this may indicated? I suspect that after this error tar stops extracting any further data, I'd really like to get more data out of this tar file! I say suspect, because it's very slow extracting the data, takes hours, so I'm not watching the screen every second. The tar file was created by the same tar command on the same server, no OS updates have taken place since etc etc.
Thanks for any input,

Andy.


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## AndyUKG (Jan 8, 2020)

update, it was indeed just stopping extraction when this error occurred. I know this as I have just run a test with GNU TAR and it continues to extract data beyond the point that BSD TAR had go to. Doesn't really cover BSD TAR in glory! Especially considering it was BSD TAR that created the archive in the first place...


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## SirDice (Jan 8, 2020)

AndyUKG said:


> I'm piping a bzip2 compressed tar file into tar on FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE and seeing this error.


Does it work if you let tar(1) uncompress it? It should automatically detect the compression. Something like `tar -xvf <mytar.tgz>`?


```
-j, --bzip, --bzip2, --bunzip2
             (c mode only) Compress the resulting archive with bzip2(1).  In
             extract or list modes, this option is ignored.  Note that this
             tar implementation recognizes bzip2 compression automatically
             when reading archives.
```

It might be the uncompression command that adds additional output. And this additional output then gets piped into tar(1).


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## AndyUKG (Jan 10, 2020)

SirDice said:


> Does it work if you let tar(1) uncompress it?



Hi, thanks for the reply. I'm currently unable to test this, if I have the oportunity to do so in the future I'll post the results here,

thanks, Andy.


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