I'm Windows user trying to get into a more functional operating system by building "Linux from Scratch" according to the guide provided at <www.linuxfromscratch.org>. One of the earliest steps involves downloading a whole bunch of compressed packages that contain everything one needs to build Linux from Scratch.

Anyway, I've gotten stuck right at that point: I can't uncompress the tar files I downloaded into my Red Hat 8-running computer. The specific error reads:

tar: This does not look like a tar file
tar: Skipping to next header
tar: archive contains obsolescent base-64 headers
tar: Error exit delayed by previous errors

Can anyone shed any light on what may be causing this? Thanks for taking the time to consider my problem.

Could be a compressed tar file. How are you untarring it?
Try
tar -zxvf filename
Or it could be a corrupt file.

Thanks for the suggestion. Thinking some corruption may have occurred, I re-downloaded the offending files, and discovered that they weren't supposed to be tar files at all. When I first downloaded them onto my Windows machine, the OS arbitrarly stuck another tar extension onto the files. Eliminating that made the files work.