Trashed Tar tape

[Earl H. Kinmonth]

[How to recover a damaged tar tape when the damage is at the
header.]

This is a common enough problem that one would think that someone would
add this as an option to tar.

[k]tar, my heavily modified version of GNUtar (of serveral years) ago
has a recovery option built in.  It will skip blocks until it finds one
that passes the header check sum test and then start extracting.

A more sophisticated approach would be to allow looking for file names
and trying the block in which a pattern is found as a header.