paxtar command not found

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

paxtar: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: paxtar: command not found

Solutions to paxtar: command not found

How To Fix paxtar: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu paxtar is provided by pax package.

pax is:

paxtar is an implementation of an archiving utility that reads and writes several formats - traditional ones, the extended formats specified in IEEE 1003.1, and the ar(5) format used by deb(5) packages (MirBSD specific paxtar extension). The pax interface was designed by IEEE 1003.2 as a compromise in the chronic controversy over which of tar or cpio is best, but this implementation offers paxcpio and paxtar for easy calling.

This is the MirBSD paxtar implementation supporting the formats ar, bcpio, cpio, SVR4 cpio with and without CRC, old tar, and ustar, but not the format known as pax yet. It has extensions for removing non-numerical user and group IDs from the archive, storing hardlinked files only once, setting ownership to the superuser, anonymising inode and device information, changing the mtime to zero, and producing GNU tar compatible trailing slashes on ustar directory nodes. Its “ar” format is suitable for operating on *.deb files, unlike that of GNU binutils.

Note that ACLs and Extended Attributes are not supported.

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install pax

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install pax.

sudo apt -y install pax

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install pax

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix paxtar command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.