Hi,

I have an archive file which seems to be created in 1999 and has a .tar extension. If I try to untar it I get:

tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: Archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Read 9320 bytes from asrsrc.tar
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Using the option -o (old-archive) does not help. I can look into the file with a text editor and it has a structure like:

aidata.f010075500001520000145000002327500662367676000130040ustar00gilmouabio00000400000126 SUBROUTINE AIDATA(X,KDTA,LDTA,LENX)
C *****************************************************************
C * Author: Arthur Gilmour *
C * Copyright: NSW Agriculture, Orange, 2800, Australia *
C * ***************************************************************
....

Even the untrained eye can clearly see the fortran code in here. Does anybody know how i can get the files in their original format from this archive?

Just a shot in the dark but maybe try renaming it to .tgz and use "tar -zxf".

I'll try anything once.

it was a tar.gz file first but I already gunzipped it to simplify the problem description. Tthank you for your response nevertheless.

Anybody else?

This is problem mentioned in quite a few posts.
This is what I tried ( original file was tared and gzipped on cygwin).

It looks like they compressed it twice.
Do this ( assuming original file is file.tar.gz)
gunzip file.tar.gz
mv file.tar file.gz
gunzip file.gz ( this will give you file ; no extension gz or tar)
tar -xvf file
-- Santosh L

If you get stuck you could always contact NSW Agriculture as shown and ask if they've got either a more up to date code version (which would be better anyway) or a readable version of the file you've got.