How do you extract a file using tar in AIX?

Question

On a NORMAL Unix distro, tar zxvf works but seems like my machine has some super old version of tar that doesn't have the right parameters.

-bash-3.00$ tar zxvf qemu-1.7.0.tar.bz2
Usage: tar -{c|r|t|u|x} [ -BdDEFhilmopRUsvw ] [ -Number ] [ -f TarFile ]
           [ -b Blocks ] [ -S [ Feet ] | [ Feet@Density ] | [ Blocksb ] ]
           [ -L InputList ] [-X ExcludeFile] [ -N Blocks ] [ -C Directory ] File ...
Usage: tar {c|r|t|u|x} [ bBdDEfFhilLXmNopRsSUvw[0-9] ] ]
           [ Blocks ] [ TarFile ] [ InputList ] [ ExcludeFile ] 
           [ [ Feet ] | [ Feet@Density ] | [ Blocksb ] ] [-C Directory ] File ...

How should I untar my .tar.bz given this verison of tar on an AIX machine?

-bash-3.00$ tar xvf qemu-1.7.0.tar.bz2
tar: 0511-169 A directory checksum error on media; 0 not equal to 71773.

Answer 1

Check out your .bz2 document support in your man tar. If none is specified, you might not know how is tar interpreting the document uncompress proceeding.

Further, that directory checksum error might be (not very likely?) to be solvable if you build by yourself an up to date version of tar. You are trying to open with an older-than-ancient tar a .tar document created with an up to date tar. This is just one possibility, maybe you want another solution, like:

You could uncompress the .tar.bz2 document in an up to date host and then pass it to the AIX machine from it or to it using the rsync command from either the hosts (the one you get working first?).