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Extracting a .tar file returns, “This does not look like a tar archive.”


I'm trying to download a dataset from here for my machine learning project
the data file appears to be tar but not extracting properly.

tar -xvf SNAKE_ALL.tar
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

tried

gzip -dc SNAKE_ALL.tar | tar -xf -
gzip: SNAKE_ALL.tar: not in gzip format
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

and

file SNAKE_ALL.tar
SNAKE_ALL.tar: HTML document, ASCII text

link to data:https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/v88xfw5wyx/1


Solution

  • It's not a tar file. The download fails and the ".tar" file you get is really a html fail saying:

    "

    403 Forbidden

    Forbidden

    You don't have permission to access /public/snake_toxins/SNAKE_ALL.tar on this server.


    Apache/2.2.15 (Linux/SUSE) mod_ssl/2.2.15 OpenSSL/1.0.0 PHP/5.3.3 Server at www.cbs.dtu.dk Port 80 "

    Next time you get something like this run the commman:

    file SNAKE_ALL.tar to see what kind of file it really is.