Munir Nassar <m_nassar at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> i got a bad .tar.bz file, is there a way to extract
> the data it contains the only copy of my C++ homework
> of the past month or so
> 
> what i did was i did a "#tar -cIf foo.tar.bz <my home
> dir>"
[...]
> here are the errors i get when extracting:
> "$tar xzvf foo.tar.bz
> 
> gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
> tar: Child returned status 1
> tar Error exit delayed from previous errors"

The problem here would be that you're trying to un-gzip a bzip'ed file. 
Have you tried `tar Ixvf foo.tar.bz'?

Also note that the GNU tar folks keep changing the (un)bzip2 parameter. 
The safest command line for it is probably `tar --bzip2 -xvf foo.tar.bz2'

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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]