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I had to transfer a few GB from a dying machine to an HFS+ partition; since I had the tarballs, it should have been a piece of cake, but:

 $ tar xvf bleh.tar 
 programaci\363n/
 tar: programaci\363n: Cannot mkdir: Invalid argument
 tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors 

The tarballs contain some ISO-8859_1-encoded filenames which are obviously not valid UTF8 streams*1.

So I wrote a script to change the filename encodings in a tarball to UTF8 on the fly. As happens often as of late*2, I had some 2-year-old code of mine lying around that solved most of the problem.

Here's the code (recode-tarball-utf8.rb) in case you also run into troubles with non-UTF8 filenames in your tarballs.

A small refactoring tale

De/encoding a tar header is quite repetitive by itself; a POSIX ("ustar") header looks like this: