I have a pretty large(50Gb) tar.gz file that I can't untar anymore. Error that I am getting is this:

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format tar: Child returned status 1 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now 

Is there any way to repair broken tar.gz?

UPDATE: Output of file command:

$ file projects.tgz projects.tgz: POSIX tar archive (GNU) 
1

2 Answers

Your file is an uncompressed tarball. The extension .tgz is misleading, you might want to give the file a better extension, like .tar:

mv projects.tgz projects.tar 

You've possibly tried to extract the file by running:

tar xzvf projects.tar 

But the correct way to extract the tarball is:

tar xvf projects.tar 

Options explained:

  • x: extract
  • z: GZip compressed (which is not the case in your file, so it should be removed for now)
  • f: file (required next argument to be the filename of the archive)
  • v: Be verbose (show file names while extracting).

See the manual page on tar for more information about this command.

1

Rename projects.tgz to projects.tar. Then you will be able to untar the archive via Nautilus for instance.

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