<p>I'm trying to download PubMed Central Open Access articles from <a href="ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_bulk" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_bulk</a>. However, I am not able to decompress the archives without errors.</p>
<p><code>tar</code> always gives me the error:</p>
<pre><code>gzip: data stream error
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
</code></pre>
<p>Does PubMed provide corrupted archives or does downloading corrupt the archive?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-06-11T10:12:00.243Z
Have you tried to decompress it in the past few days since it's been updated? Picking a smaller file, `tar -zxvf non_comm_use.A-B.xml.tar.gz` works fine.
Michael
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-06-19T19:18:06.880Z
I was eventually able to do it on Linux. It didn't work on MacOS for me (not even with gnu-tar).
TomTom
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-10-28T06:06:34.243Z
The download attempt might be caused by an attempt to download the files while these files are being updated by the NCBI server. Try downloading on other days and make sure you have a strong connectivity.
venrey
<public-databases>
PubMed Central Open Access archives are corrupted
# PubMed Central Open Access archives are corrupted

(Asked by: username_0 on 2021-05-26)

I'm trying to download PubMed Central Open Access articles from ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_bulk. However, I am not able to decompress the archives without errors.
tar always gives me the error:
gzip: data stream error
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

Does PubMed provide corrupted archives or does downloading corrupt the archive?

**Tags:** public-databases
> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Have you tried to decompress it in the past few days since it's been updated? Picking a smaller file, `tar -zxvf non_comm_use.A-B.xml.tar.gz` works fine.  
> **username_0**: I was eventually able to do it on Linux. It didn't work on MacOS for me (not even with gnu-tar).  
> **username_2**: The download attempt might be caused by an attempt to download the files while these files are being updated by the NCBI server. Try downloading on other days and make sure you have a strong connectivity.  

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## 0 answers

