I received a .tgz file with data I needed to extract, so I set it up to run overnight using the tar -xz command on a Windows machine. When I came back in the morning it was still running with a huge log file. I figured out that it had somehow gotten itself in a recursive loop. It extracted folders A – Z, and then within folder S it extracted folders A– Z again, and then again, and again. By the time I canceled it, it had recursed >400 times and extracted 123 TB from a 600 GB file.
I’m in the process of deleting all of the extra files and there are still some files that were never extracted because it got stuck looping before they were reached. I’d like to reattempt the extraction, but I’m worried I’ll just hit the same issue again. What would have caused this to happen? Is a problem like this likely to be caused by something wrong with the compressed file, or could it have been a spurious thing caused at time of extraction and not likely to happen again?
