[9fans] bunzip2 problem

[9fans] bunzip2 problem

[Gregory Pavelcak]

Hello all,

I'm afraid I may have done something wrong in creating a .tbz file, and
now I'm unable to unzip it. I'm hoping there's something I can do to
recover. Here, from memory, is what I did.

I was running Plan 9 in vmware on Windows XP. From  /mail/box, I did
tar cf p9mail.tar glenda. that seemed to work and gave me a tar file. I
then decided to bzip2 it since I was going to send it over the net I
figured I'd make it smaller, so bzip2 p9mail.tar gave me p9mail.tbz.
Then, I used cifs to get access to our local Windows server and copied
the file over there. Here's the brilliant step. It didn't occur to me
to confirm that I could unzip the thing before replacing my
Windows/Plan 9 setup with FreeBSD. Since then, I tried to bunzip the
file from BSD (I don't remember the messages from there, but it
failed.) and on my Plan 9 box at home. Here's what I get

cpu% bunzip2 p9mail.tbz
bunzip2: decompress failed
bunzip2: can't write p9mail.tar: './bunzip2' file does not exist

I've also tried bunzip2 using -c and redirection, and it still fails.

I don't understand the './bunzip2' file does not exist" complaint. Just
for the heck of it, I did "touch bunzip2" in the directory where I was
trying to bunzip and got

cpu% bunzip2 p9mail.tbz
bunzip2: decompress failed
bunzip2: can't write p9mail.tar: exec header invalid

I suppose this isn't much to go on. I'm assuming that I did something
wrong in making the file or that something bizarre happened in the cifs
copy. Can I recover this somehow? It contains stored emails and an
outbox from work.

Thanks.

Greg

Re: [9fans] bunzip2 problem

[Charles Forsyth]

i can't advise about the decompression failure, but
you get the strange messages because bunzip2 uses %r
but the error was an internal one, and %r prints the last
system error for the process, which was the shell exec
searching . before /bin for a suitable bunzip2 when
you invoked it.  thus, the text after ``can't write...:'' isn't
relevant to the underlying problem.

Re: [9fans] bunzip2 problem

[Russ Cox]

there is a program on unix called bzip2recover
which may or may not be helpful in getting some
of your data back.  you can build it on plan9 with
cd /sys/src/cmd/bzip2; mk 8.bzip2recover.

russ


On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 12:36:28 +0000, Charles Forsyth
<forsyth@terzarima.net> wrote:
> i can't advise about the decompression failure, but
> you get the strange messages because bunzip2 uses %r
> but the error was an internal one, and %r prints the last
> system error for the process, which was the shell exec
> searching . before /bin for a suitable bunzip2 when
> you invoked it.  thus, the text after ``can't write...:'' isn't
> relevant to the underlying problem.
>
>

Re: [9fans] bunzip2 problem

[Steve Simon]

> I'm afraid I may have done something wrong in creating a .tbz file, and
>now I'm unable to unzip it. I'm hoping there's something I can do to

What you did sounds OK to me, I haven't had a case of cifs
corrupting a file, though that doesn't help you.

I'am sure there are definitely no problems with cifs getting
cr/nl substitutions wrong as it doesn't even try.

Maybe when you copied the file from the windows server to the freebsd box
it got corrupted? Do you still have a copy on the windows server?

Anyone else had problems with cifs? I have only had one bug report
early on which was (thanklfully) was an easy fix.

-Steve