I lost the URL of the page where I discovered this tip, but nevertheless, I had a corrupt *.tgz archive. When I tried to extract the contents, I kept getting this error:
tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
I found that when I extracted the contents using
gunzip < corrupt_tar.tgz | tar xvf -
I still received the errors, but I was able to read more of the archive then when I used
tar xvfz corrupt_tar.tgz