On Mon, 11 Oct 1999 04:19:56 -0400, Noam Koren
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I have the following problem:
>
>I'm making a tar file (from posix shell) of ascii files arranged in
>directories and sub-directories.
>
>Then I ftp the file to PC or UNIX station.
>Doing tar xvf there (UNIX) gives me the error message:
>
>x mytar, 0 bytes, 0 tape blocks
>x mytar/mydir, 0 bytes, 0 tape blocks
>tar: directory checksum error
>
>What is the problem? do I have to issue some special flags while running
>tar?
>
...

Some caveats with tar on 5.5, at least. This version uses a new tar
format to encode the MPE file attributes of the files in the archive.
It can lead to some strange results when untarring on a non-mpe 5.5
(yes, even mpe 5.0)  system. Depending on the system you're untarring
on you get a file X.attributes in sub dir tmp, or even in /tmp while
other systems just fail to untar the archive. You can switch of this
"feature" when creating the tar-archive by issuing the, undocumented,
-A flag. Why inclusion of the file X.attributes was made the default,
especially when -A is undocumented, only the gods know. Perhaps this
feature is also your problem.

Also beware that tar sometimes, SILENTLY, fails to correctly untar
certain MPE type files on a MPE-system. This is especially the case
for files with "weird" record lengths, like 500 bytes variable binary
and who knows what other. Have encountered no problems however with
bytestream files.

HTH
Danny A. van Delft   [log in to unmask]