untar Couldn't open

When I try and use untar (from the self-extracting archive)

*untar source/tar RAM:$.dest
Untar (1.01 11-Oct-2017) 'source/tar'

Couldn't open "RAM::RamDisc0.$.dest.file"
Finish Untar
Directories = 0 Files = 0

where ‘file’ is the first file in the archive. Is anybody else able to extract using untar?

I’m trying to use this because I want to see if I can extract files tarred on Linux and get the filetypes back ok on RISC OS.

The !Help file for !UntarBZ2 contains the following text at the end:

Note: the version of tar which has been included has some modifications which
improve the way it handles command line parameters and the way it sets
filetypes. These changes might cause problems if you don't want the specific
usage that UnTarBZ2 requires. As such, you are advised not to use this
version of tar for general command line tarball extraction.

I’m not sure if this is relevant to your issues, but I thought it worth mentioning.

I don’t think it’s especially useful to use tar as the transport for archiving files on other systems for use on RISC OS. There’s no defined way of holding the filetype information in the archive, and (as far as I understand) the support for extraction is poor for tar files in RISC OS. A generally better solution is to use Zip archives with the RISC OS file extension information present.

Zap archives can be built on non-RISC OS systems with a suitably built InfoZip, and extracted with SparkFS or the command line Zip tools on RISC OS (InfoZip/MiniUnzip). If you need to build Zip archives on other systems and don’t have a built version of InfoZip, consider using the Python module https://github.com/gerph/python-zipinfo-riscos which handles creation and extraction of RISC OS files with RISC OS file type extensions present, or the `,xxx` or `,llllllll,eeeeeeee` forms.

The RISC OS Zip file extensions have been around for quite a number of years.

Thanks all, I’ve settled on using SparkFS to extract from the tar as it turns out it gets the filetypes right enough for me.

This is still a bug for me running UnTarBZ2 though on RPCemu; I only focussed in on untar because I figured out that’s where the error was happening, I still goes wrong if running it fron the UnTarBZ2 frontend.