Pivotal Greenplum Installation Error: "GNU tar is Needed to Extract this Installer"

Products

• VMware Tanzu Greenplum

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

Pivotal Greenplum installation (Using the /bin/bash greenplumxxxx.bin command) reports "GNU tar is needed to extract this installer" error:

*****************************************************
Error: GNU tar is needed to extract this installer.
Please add it to your path before running the installer again.
Exiting installer.
*****************************************************

 

Environment

Resolution

Follow these steps to fix this issue:

1. Install a newer version GUN tar. For solaris10 x86 system, for example, tar-1.26-sol10-x86-local.gz.

2. Use the pkgadd -d command to install the package. This release of GNU tar is installed under the directory /user/local/bin.

3. Make sure that this directory has been included in the system environment variable PATH:

env | grep PATH

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

4. Make a gtar link to this release of tar:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/tar /usr/local/bin/gtar

5. Verify that gtar is working now:

gtar 
which gtar