Thanks to the many managers who responded.
Many pointed me to emacs (Which in this case I did not use since
I wanted something without a steep learning curve, for me anyway)
Also recommended was the binary editor beav (posted to comp.sources
years ago!).
The most useful was the editor 'vim', which is a vi-ish editor and
allowed me to search the tar file for the next header and start the
extract from there....
The recipe for the recovery went like this.
(If the user has a listing of the archive, it does make it easier..)
1) try tar -xvf damaged_tar_file
2) Note the last file recovered.
3) take tar file into vim (You might want to do this in a separate
window, and just stay with it)
4) locate next file in archive.
5) save from there to the end of the tar file in a new file
6) go to (1) and continue until you can no longer retrieve files.
Using this recipe, I recovered all 134 files from the archive..
I still do not know exactly what happened to smudge the file, OH Well!!
Also, I might add, that having been a sysadmin on several different
architectures (CDC, Cray, SUN, DEC, etc.) I DO believe that part of
our job is to help the user recover files, AFTER ALL, they look to
us as the GURU's!!
------------------------------------------------------------------
Jerry Litteer
Scientific Technical Support e-mail: gll@inel.gov
Lockheed-Martin Idaho Technologies Company
POB 1625 M.S. 3640 Phone: (208) 526-9117
Idaho Falls, Id. 83415-3640 FAX: (208) 526-2641
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"I'm not gonna be Y2K compliant and work 1 Jan 2000...
It's a holiday and a Saturday to boot!!!"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:13:14 CDT