How To Resolve ‘bsdtar’ “Ignoring malformed pax extended attribute” Error

Jean-Nicolas Boulay
1 min readOct 3, 2019

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The Error :
# bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-rpi-latest.tar.gz -C root
bsdtar: Ignoring malformed pax extended attribute
bsdtar: Ignoring malformed pax extended attribute
bsdtar: Ignoring malformed pax extended attribute
bsdtar: Ignoring malformed pax extended attribute
bsdtar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.

So, I was just trying to untar Arch Linux tar gz file, but then I ran into this strange error. It turns out it was ‘libarchive’ that was too old. Here is how you solve this:

wget https://www.libarchive.org/downloads/libarchive-3.4.0.zip
./configure
make
sudo make install

When I check the version of ‘bsdtar’ I got this:
bsdtar 3.4.0 — libarchive 3.4.0 zlib/1.2.11 liblzma/5.2.2

Fin

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