Tar error: Unexpected EOF in archive

Interesting. I have a few questions which may point out the problem.

1/ Are you untarring on the same platform as you're tarring on? They may be different versions of tar (e.g., GNU and old-unix)? If they're different, can you untar on the same box you tarred on?

2/ What happens when you simply gunzip myarchive.tar.gz? Does that work? Maybe your file is being corrupted/truncated. I'm assuming you would notice if the compression generated errors, yes?

Based on the GNU tar source, it will only print that message if find_next_block() returns 0 prematurely which is usually caused by truncated archive.

I had a similar problem with truncated tar files being produced by a cron job and redirecting standard out to a file fixed the issue.

From talking to a colleague, cron creates a pipe and limits the amount of output that can be sent to standard out. I fixed mine by removing -v from my tar command, making it much less verbose and keeping the error output in the same spot as the rest of my cron jobs. If you need the verbose tar output, you'll need to redirect to a file, though.

May be you have ftped the file in ascii mode instead of binary mode ? If not, this might help.

$ gunzip myarchive.tar.gz

And then untar the resulting tar file using

$ tar xvf myarchive.tar

Hope this helps.

In my case, I had started untar before the uploading of the tar file was complete.