Solaris

I downloaded GNUtar from sunfreeware.con and installed it on a sparc running sun 9.
Performed pkgadd -d on the required lib and tar file and everything seemed to be ok.
I tried to extract a file from a tar created using the sun version with no success. Tar ran for several hours working on the extraction but never finished and gave no error messages.
I moved the tar file to another machine running suse and was able to extract the file without any problems.
Can anyone point me to what to check?

Make sure you are providing the absolut path to the GNU tar. I believe it's /usr/local/bin/tar

It might also be called gtar instead of tar.

I agree with dangral. Most of the packages from the sunfreeware site installs in /usr/local/bin.

I did make sure that I was running the GNU version. Any other ideas?

Try to tar something small, that way when you test it wont run for hours. Then do a tar xvf with the GNU tar and post the results back.

OK, I got it figured out finally primarily thanks to renard who had similar issues on a message he had posted in the "Unix for Advanced & Expert Users" forum.
First, the GNU version of tar I downloaded does not support the command format "tar --extract --file=file.tar filename"
the --extract and --file arguments are deprecated in the version I downloaded even though they still work in the version supplied with Suse and Fedora. The command I should have used was "tar -xvf file.tar /exactpath/filename"
I was able to extract a single file without any problems. I guess that using the --extract/--file flags does not give an error message since I never received one.
Thanks for the help