Tar error: Unexpected EOF in archive

Question

I tar a directory full of JPEG images:

tar cvfz myarchive.tar.gz mydirectory

When I untar the archive:

tar xvfz myarchive.tar         


        

Answer 1

I had a similar error, but in my case the cause was file renaming. I was creating a gzipped file file1.tar.gz and repeatedly updating it in another tarfile with tar -uvf ./combined.tar ./file1.tar.gz. I got the unexpected EOF error when after untarring combined.tar and trying to untar file1.tar.gz.

I noticed there was a difference in the output of file before and after tarring:

$file file1.tar.gz
file1.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, was "file1.tar", last modified: Mon Jul 29 12:00:00 2019, from Unix

$tar xvf combined.tar
$file file1.tar.gz
file1.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, was "file_old.tar", last modified: Mon Jul 29 12:00:00 2019, from Unix

So, it appears that the file had a different name when I originally created combined.tar, and using the tar update function doesn't overwrite the metadata for the gzipped filename. The solution was to recreate combined.tar from scratch instead of updating it.

I still don't know exactly what happened, since changing the name of a gzipped file doesn't normally break it.