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I am trying to extract a .tar.xz file on my Ubuntu Mate computer. No matter what I do, I get this error:

xz: (stdin): File format not recognized
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I have done the following (although my repeated attempts to circumvent the error may highlight my ignorance):

tar xf file.tar.xz

Then,

unxz file.tar.xz #results in file.tar

That time, I got this similar error:

unxz: file.tar.xz: File format not recognized

Then, I did this:

tar -xJf file.tar.xz

Etcetera...

I tried updating/installing tar and xz-utils using

sudo apt-get install xz-utils

for x-utils, and

sudo apt-get install tar

for tar. They both updated/installed successfully, but when I did the above things again, I got the same errors.

EDIT ONE

When I use:

file file.tar.xz

I get

file.tar.xz: HTML document, UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines

When I try to open it with Engrampa using

engrampa file.tar.xz

I get the same error mentioned above.

I am running Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on the Raspberry Pi 3.

The output of

apt list xz-utils

is

Listing... Done
xz-utils/xenial,now 5.1.1alpha+20120614-2ubuntu2 armhf [installed]

The output of 

xz --version

is

xz (XZ Utils) 5.1.0alpha
liblzma 5.1.0alpha

The output of

tar --version

is

tar (GNU tar) 1.28
Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Liscense GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/lisenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by John Gilmore and Jay Fenlason.

I obtained the file (pepper-flash-v.20.0.0.228r1.tar.xz) by using the command line

wget http://dl.free.fr/qVkzvqSiB -O pepper-flash-v20.0.0.228-r1.tar.xz

EDIT TWO

Thanks for all your answers. This question is closed.

SNBeast
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3 Answers3

12
file.tar.xz: HTML document, UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines

indicates that I downloaded a website. That's why it won't extract.

SNBeast
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3

Please do not download files from a random site. The contents of that file could have been altered to mess up you system.

The correct place to download from is the debian wiki page and you download it from their tracker site and here is the direct download. It will download pepperflashplugin-nonfree_1.8.1+deb8u1.tar.xz and after downloading you can use your tar command to extract it.

To install though I would advice to use the normal Ubuntu installation. Enable "Canonical Partners" in Software & Updates and then run ...

sudo apt update
sudo apt install adobe-flashplugin

This will install flash and the pepper flash plugin.

Rinzwind
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1

In my case, the specified archive file was not downloaded correctly because of a certificate error. Remove -q from wget to see whether you might have the same problem.

Christoph Thiede
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