When extracting a tar archive, I get the error "No such file or directory found"

Question

When I attempt to extract a huge tar archive, I get the following error:

"filename: No such file or directory found"

Any suggestions on what could be going wrong?

Answer 1

This may happen if the disk is full. If you extract using:

tar -xvf <filename.tar>

you may see the following message before any No such file or directory found:

mkdir failed: Disk quota exceeded

Answer 2

why dont you try to test your tar file first!

file yourfile.tar

(it should say its a tar file if it's not broken)

Then...

tar -tvf yourfile.tar

It should give a listing of the contents of your tar file without actually writing it to disk. Just to check the integrity of it. Also, if your file is larger tan 2GB it is posible that your tar binary wont work, try gtar instead! with that info, you can go further... regards, Daniel.