tar Command – Resolving ‘Cannot Open: Invalid Argument’ Error

The : in the filename are confusing tar. At least for the coreutils version of tar, the --file switch can take an argument of the form:

hostname:/remote/file/name

so I'm guessing tar is trying to interpret that filename in a manner that is not what you meant.

Prefixing the file name with ./ (or specifying a full path) should solve your problem.

TAR_DUMP="./gypo_$NOW.tar.gz"
echo "Tar name: $TAR_DUMP"
tar -cvzf $TAR_DUMP gypo

Another fix would be to add the --force-local switch.

--force-local

Forces `tar' to interpret the filename given to --file as a local file, even if it looks like a remote tape drive name.

tar limit file names to 256 bytes (with GNU extensions). Linux File Systems support at least 256 bytes per file name. It means any file packed by tar may be extracted without error. So I suppose two causes:

1. The tarball is corrupted, check it by:

   $ tar -tvf tarball.tar
   

   You will see some erros if any.

2. You use a "virtual" file system like fusecompress or ecryptfs (with selective file copmpression/encryption) and your file name is a bit shorter or equal to the file system limit. The trick is when you mount a directory with fusecompress (for example) and create a file name foo.bar the virtual filesystem creates a file called foo.bar.gz and compress it transparently, but hides the real file name from you. And if you create a file with 254 byte name long you get an error because it will try to append a suffix to it.

   In this case simply extracting the tarball outside of the virtual file system should help:

   $ sudo mkdir /home/${USER}-temp
   $ sudo chown $USER /home/${USER}-temp
   $ tar -xvf tarball.tar -C /home/${USER}-temp
   

Anyway, try to trace it to get more information:

$ strace -o tar-strace.log tar -tf tarball.tar
$ ltrace -o tar-ltrace.log tar -tf tarball.tar