10.1.2 Data Corruption and Repair

If an archive becomes corrupted by an I/O error, this may corrupt the data in an extracted file. Worse, it may corrupt the file’s metadata, which may cause later parts of the archive to become misinterpreted. An tar-format archive contains a checksum that most likely will detect errors in the metadata, but it will not detect errors in the data.

If data corruption is a concern, you can compute and check your own checksums of an archive by using other programs, such as cksum.

When attempting to recover from a read error or data corruption in an archive, you may need to skip past the questionable data and read the rest of the archive. This requires some expertise in the archive format and in other software tools.

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