Hi, This report is for tar-1.29, compiled and installed on Mac El Capitan. When the environment variable "LANG" is not set, tar cannot handle a compressed archive--the error is "broken pipe". For example:
m3rgma0371carn - T tar tvzf archive.tgz gnutar: Child died with signal 11 gnutar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now m3rgma0371carn - T $ export LANG=" " m3rgma0371carn - T $ tar tvzf archive.tgz drwxr-xr-x gross/staff 0 2016-08-29 12:10 hsperfdata_gross/ drwx------ gross/staff 0 2016-08-13 14:41 com.apple.AddressBook.ContactsAccountsService/ [...] There is no problem if I gunzip the archive first, and then run tar. The broken pipe happens whether tar is compiled with clang or gcc-6.1. I think that this only happens when gettext, libiconv, and libintl are all installed. I don't know if there are other libraries as well that are involved in replicating the error. I'm happy to send you config.log, if you need that to decipher the problem. I much prefer using gnutar to bsdtar, which is the Mac default, and I spent a lot of time trying to understand the reason for the error. Thanks. Let me know if you need more information.--Rob -- Rob Gross (617) 552-3758 Department of Mathematics http://fmwww.bc.edu/gross/ Boston College gr...@bc.edu Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3806