Why is that when I attempt to verify an archive using tar I am displayed the error this does not look like a tar archive?

Question

I am new to the world of linux and when attempting to verify a tar archive I am displayed the following error. When running the command tar cvfW archivename.tar filename directoryname does not yield any errors.

Answer 1

You have the options in the wrong order. f is for file, so it has to be last the way you are doing it.

tar cvWf tarball.tar *.txt

Create, Verbose, Verify, File

[powellnj@insomnia ~]$ touch {1,2,3}.txt
[powellnj@insomnia ~]$ tar cvWf tarball.tar *.txt
1.txt
2.txt
3.txt
Verify 1.txt
Verify 2.txt
Verify 3.txt