How to get around this error when unTarring an archive “tar: Cannot change ownership to uid 1000, gid 1000: Operation not permitted”

Question

When attempting to untar a file in a docker container with:

tar -zvxf training.tar.gz -C data/multi30k

I received the following error (train.de is a file within the .tar file):

tar: train.de Cannot change ownership to uid 1000, gid 1000: Operation not permitted

But the file untar's just fine locally. What could be causing this error?

Solution

The problem is described here. This problem arises when trying to untar in a context where tar thinks it is root (e.g. a Docker container). The solution is to add the flag --no-same-owner:

tar -zvxf training.tar.gz -C data/multi30k --no-same-owner