Issue
I am using gdb version 6.8 on an ubuntu 9 machine image. I would like to update it to the latest one (7.8?) but I'm not sure how to do it.
I tried following the instructions here https://askubuntu.com/questions/529781/upgrade-from-gdb-7-7-to-7-8 but they didn't work.
It stopped at the tar command and said "this does not look a tar file"
Can anyone help?
Thanks
Solution
This is just a guess, but it might be the case that your version of tar is so old it does not support the xz compression scheme. The link you reference suggests downloading gdb-7.8.tar.xz, you can try running unxz gdb-7.8.tar.xz which will uncompress the file into gdb-7.8.tar, you can then retry tar -xf gdb-7.8.tar which should now work.
Alternatively you could try downloading this file instead http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/gdb-7.8.2.tar.gz, this is the 7.8.2 release compared to the 7.8 you were using before, and so contains a few minor bug fixes, however, this file uses the gzip compression scheme, which has been supported in tar for longer than xz, this new file should extract fine with tar -xf gdb-7.8.2.tar.gz.
Finally, you might be interested in skipping 7.8 completely, and moving straight to 7.10 (http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/gdb-7.10.tar.gz) as this should contain even more exciting new features and improvements.
Answered By - Andrew