Had a strange error being reported when exporting features from a Drupal 7 instance, in that the resultant tar file was not extracting using any of the usual tools, such as tar etc. $ file features_export-7.x-1.0-alpha1.tar features_export-7.x-1.0-alpha1.tar: data File magic showed that the file was wrong, but looking at the file itself looked correct at first glance, and a look around on Drupal.org returned this old thread which lead me to