GNU tar problem

Everett M. Greene · 2008-02-24T17:53:14+00:00

I've been using a 1998 version of Gnu tar for years andit has worked fine. Recently, it has started balking atworking correctly. It's suffering from bit rot with age?The specific problem is that (almost) regardless of thefile it's told to archive, it returns an error messageof ": Unknown file type; file ignored."What's really mystifying is how a file can be of thewrong type for tar since tar shouldn't be concernedwith a file "type". [I strongly suspect the errormessage is erroneous.]Has anyone else encountered this problem?