FreeBSD: /usr/bin/tar: unrecognized option '--fast-read'

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FreeBSD: /usr/bin/tar: unrecognized option '--fast-read'

Last Modified: Nov 6, 2013, 10:30 pm

Found an issue where tar was throwing this error, seemingly because tar wasn't compiled with the --fast-read option (best guess as to the cause):

/usr/bin/tar: unrecognized option '--fast-read'

I've only seen this issue once, but found that /usr/bin/tar was gnutar 1.26 on a FreeBSD 9.2 32-bit box.
The tar binary that we really want is /usr/bin/bsdtar, often pointed to with a symbolic link from tar.
In the case where it wasn't working, /usr/bin/tar was a binary, not a link.

If you don't have libarchive, you'll need it, eg:

pkg_add -r libarchive

Then make sure the new bsdtar exists, and link to it:

cd /usr/bin
ls -la bsdtar
mv tar tar.gnu
ln -s bsdtar tar