---

3.9.3 Keywords applicable for tar --extract

The following keywords control warnings that can be issued during archive extraction.

warning: existing-file ¶

‘%s: skipping existing file’

warning: timestamp ¶

‘%s: implausibly old time stamp %s’
‘%s: time stamp %s is %s s in the future’

warning: contiguous-cast ¶

‘Extracting contiguous files as regular files’

warning: symlink-cast ¶

‘Attempting extraction of symbolic links as hard links’, warning message ‘Attempting extraction of symbolic links as hard links’

warning: unknown-cast ¶

‘%s: Unknown file type '%c', extracted as normal file’

warning: ignore-newer ¶

‘Current %s is newer or same age’

warning: unknown-keyword ¶

‘Ignoring unknown extended header keyword '%s'’

warning: decompress-program ¶

Controls verbose description of failures occurring when trying to run alternative decompressor programs (see alternative decompression programs). This warning is disabled by default (unless --verbose is used). A common example of what you can get when using this warning is:

$ tar --warning=decompress-program -x -f archive.Z
tar (child): cannot run compress: No such file or directory
tar (child): trying gzip

This means that tar first tried to decompress archive.Z using compress, and, when that failed, switched to gzip.

warning: record-size ¶

‘Record size = %lu blocks’