Linux / OS X tar incompatibility – tarballs created on OS X give errors when untarred in Linux

I Googled for the error message and it seems like a BSD tar vs. GNU tar issue.

Install GNU tar if you can on Mac OS and use that to create the tar.

If you are using Mavericks or newer, then gnutar is no longer included by default.

The work around, if you use homebrew, is to execute the following:

brew install gnu-tar

You can then use the command gtar for linux compatability.

If you want to replace tar with gtar, simply replace the symlink

tar --version
ll `which tar`
sudo unlink `which tar`
sudo ln -s `which gtar` /usr/bin/tar
tar --version

To restore the original tar provided with Mac Os X, run the above commands but replace which gtar with which bsdtar

Source:
https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm/issues/576

GNU tar doesn't like some of the optional information the default OSX BSD tar includes.

GNU tar will let you suppress those warnings with the option:

--warning=no-unknown-keyword

See: https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/tar_27.html

Note that BSD tar doesn't support that flag so if you need to run the same unpacking code on all platforms you can use something like:

isGnuTar=$(tar --version | grep -q 'gnu')
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
    echo "Detected GNU tar"
    tar --warning=no-unknown-keyword -zxf my.tar.gz
else
    tar -zxf my.tar.gz
fi

To extract the tar file properly without any errors on a Linux system you could use bsdtar.

sudo apt-get install bsdtar

Then use as normal.

bsdtar -xvf file.tar where file.tar is the tar file you want to extract.

Source: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tar/+bug/129314

Alternatively you can also use GNOME file roller.

COPYFILE_DISABLE=1 tar cf filename.tar

or

tar --disable-copyfile cf filename.tar

This is the least discoverable feature of tar on OS X that I am personally aware of.

See also Why do I get files like ._foo in my tarball on OS X?

Edit: it looks like this might only stop the creation of the unwanted ._foo-type files, it doesn't stop the header creation (at least on Yosemite/10.10); thanks commenters for pointing it out. However, (for the bonus points:) you can gracefully handle such tarballs by extracting them like this:

tar xf filename.tar --pax-option=delete=SCHILY.*,delete=LIBARCHIVE.*

This worked using gnu tar 1.15.1, which is pretty old! Alternatively, you can use pax instead, which (for me) throws the extra info into a PaxHeader directory, but at least exits without error:

pax -rf filename.tar