Unable to untar the xx.tar.zst file with the error "zstd: /*stdin*\: unsupported format"

Question

I cloned a large tar file from the address: https://github.com/uni-due-syssec/evmpatch-eval-data/tree/master/large-scale; but when I untar it in the Linux system with the command tar -I zstd -xvf osiris_dataset_14k.tar.zst, I encounter the following errors:

zstd: /*stdin*\: unsupported format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

I surf on the internet but don't find the solution

Answer 1

The file in question is stored in that git repo as a Git LFS Record. I suspect what you are trying to decompress is just the LFS pointer, which looks like this:

version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1
oid sha256:1b6282bef881e59ad83ac4aecc27fc41025bec88ed8b44983e904372fdd22fd4
size 753961811

So Zstd is accurately reporting that it is being given data that is not zstd-compressed, and it can't decompress it.

Answer 2

The file you have pasted is a Git LFS record (reference to, not the actual file).

The first step should be to retrieve the file, therefore, install Git LFS - see more details on installing LFS here: https://packagecloud.io/github/git-lfs/install

After its installed run:

git lfs fetch

That will initiate the downloading process, and then you can run the tar command.

If you already have Git LFS installed you can just use:

git clone ...

And you don't need the two steps mentioned above - you should see if you have LFS installed during the cloning:

Downloading LFS objects: 0% (0/1), 285 MB | 5.3 MB/s