*.tar.tar files

Godboo · 01-14-2004, 12:11 AM

Hi again...

Well I'm trying to install MPlayer and I'm running into some problems. I tried installing the .rpm files but I just ran into too many dependencies so I said forgot that.

Then I tried compiling from the source, only the source files I downloaded are in *.tar.tar form.

So I tried using various tar shell commands without any luck. How do I extract *.tar.tar files?

Thx guys...

BTW...I know this is probably a FAQ in the forums but I couldn't find any posts related to my question in the search results

.

Thrasher · 01-14-2004, 12:22 AM

Looks like too many tars, rename to just have one .tar and run this command:
tar xvf (filename.tar)

scott_R · 01-14-2004, 02:27 AM

I've seen this before. If Thrasher's post doesn't help, you might simply want to run "tar -xvf (filename)" twice. Some people think (and sometimes it works, but not often) that double-tarring a file makes it smaller. In most cases, once a file's tarred, it's as small as it's going to get, and the double tarring is only going to add useless extra fluff to the system. Still, it's worth a shot.

willand · 01-14-2004, 06:20 AM

and why tar a file two times ?
it's not better to use gzip... to compress the file ?

Godboo · 01-14-2004, 09:56 AM

Sorry, I should have mentioned this earlier.
Whenever I try to run the tar -xvf command I get a few errors:

tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

I got the file from the MPlayer official site, so I assume it wouldn't be a bad file right?

aaa · 01-14-2004, 10:06 AM

What did you use to download it?

guygriffiths · 01-14-2004, 10:06 AM

Nope, it's not a bad file. I'm guessing you downloaded this in Windows originally? Certainly windows saves *.tar.bz2 files as *.tar.tar
To make sure, do:
file filename.tar.tar and you should get something like:
filename.bz2: bzip2 compressed data, block size = xxxk

Then untar it with:
mv filename.tar.tar filename.tar.bz2
tar xvjf filename.tar.bz2
or
mv filename.tar.tar filename.tar.gz
tar xvzf filename.tar.gz
if it's a gzip file.

Hope this works
Guy