invalid tar magic error

I am running damn small linux and was trying to unwrap the tarball for zinf when I got the error message:
invalid tar magic

I tried tar -xf, tar -x and a few others with same result exexpt tar -x just stalled and nothing happened

thinking maybe it was a problem with zinf I tried a different download of zinf and got the same result again.

tried a Grip tarball and had similar results

this happens as user or root

tar -xf was working fine last time I used it

I can't think of anything I changed lately that should effect tar but I'm still new to linux so maybe I screwed it up

google searches and here showed nothing so I'm thinking this isn't very common

What does this error message mean?
any ideas on fixing it or something else to try?

Thanks
Ben

I think that the tarball is corrupt. Many filetypes will contain a certain number at a particular spot identifying the file type. This is the magic number.

Type:file zinf.tgz and see what the file command says the file is.
( ps. I guessed on the extention )

I tried your advice with the file zinf... thing and was told it was a tar archive.

Also tried booting from the Damn Small cd to see if I had messed up tar somehow and it still didn't work.
It seems there is something wrong with the file but same thing happens with grip and I have downloaded both a few times from different mirrors.

This is very odd,

Thanks for any help

Ben

had to reinstall damn small for other reasons, so tar works now, never did figure out what caused the problem...

(edit) after reinsall tar works for some things but still not grip and zinf must be something with these downloads?

Ben

You may already have mpg123 on your system. I downloaded streamtuner and use that for listening to streams. XMMS is a very good program for listening to cd's or streams. You could also use xine.

I did have a lot of work getting all of the library files I needed to run streamripper. This is the program that streamtuner calls to record streams.

Tarballs are usually compressed with either gzip or bzip2. To decompress a .tgz file, use: tar xvzf <tarball-name>

If it was compressed with bzip2, use:
tar xvjf <tarball-name>

It is possible that one of these was used to compress the tarball but they didn't change the extension to indicate that.

Could also be that they just plain screwed up and you can't decompress or untar it.