MinGW tar compression problem

Question

I am unable to get the Mingw tar to work with compress files. It does not filter through the proper compression utility. However, tar will work if I manually uncompress the file first. I have tried in both the MSYS shell and Windows cmd. Has anyone had this problem or is it a MinGW bug?

For example, this does not work:

C:\Users\home\Desktop>tar -tzf wdiff-0.5.tar.gz
tar: Cannot use compressed or remote archives
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

C:\Users\home\Desktop>tar -t -Zgzip -f wdiff-0.5.tar.gz
tar: Cannot use compressed or remote archives
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

C:\Users\home\Desktop>tar -tf wdiff-0.5.tar.gz
tar: Hmm, this doesn't look like a tar archive
tar: Skipping to next file header
tar: Only read 6732 bytes from archive wdiff-0.5.tar.gz
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

However, this works:

gzip -d wdiff-0.5.tar.gz
tar -tf wdiff-0.5.tar

Answer 1

some tar implementations do not include compressing/decompressing. thats just .. how they are configured / compiled / linked. i would not describe that as a bug.

you could combine the 2 steps involved in untarring a compressed tarball with something like this:

 % zcat in.tar.gz | tar xf -

or

 % zcat in.tar.gz | tar tf -

(zcat is usually just aliased to 'gzip -cd')