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From: ucbked@athena.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Trashed Tar tape
Message-ID: <1990Sep21.040258.16669@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 21 Sep 90 04:02:58 GMT
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Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator)
Organization: Centre for Japanese Studies, Univ. of Sheffield
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[How to recover a damaged tar tape when the damage is at the
header.]

This is a common enough problem that one would think that someone would
add this as an option to tar.

[k]tar, my heavily modified version of GNUtar (of serveral years) ago
has a recovery option built in.  It will skip blocks until it finds one
that passes the header check sum test and then start extracting.

A more sophisticated approach would be to allow looking for file names
and trying the block in which a pattern is found as a header.