Hi Isaac, This seems to be a rare case as we have never had this problem before. I suspect that there are at least two independent issues at play -- the inclusion of the './' in the file names and the inclusion of the '._' files in the tarball. The first could be the result of invoking tar with './' before each file to be included, and the second is a Mac thing. I tried doing a tar on my Mac and untar on Linux, and the following seems to work: tar czvf bc.tgz bc.fasta bc.qual bc.fasta bc.qual where bc.fasta and bc.qual are plain text uncompressed files. Listing the files should then give: tar tvzf bc.tgz -rw-r--r-- dsouza/ 1330 2009-04-30 13:36:35 bc.fasta -rw-r--r-- dsouza/ 2175 2009-04-30 13:36:45 bc.qual without the '._' files. Try this and see if it works, get in touch if it doesn't. Regards, Mark ----- "Isaac Hilburn" <[email protected]> wrote:

From: "Isaac Hilburn" <[email protected]> To: "Mark D'Souza" <[email protected]> Cc: "Rachel Poretsky" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 7:09:59 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central Subject: Re: Your MG-RAST jobs (3283, 3284, 3285)

Mark,

Has there been a problem in the past uploading files that are compressed using compression programs on a Mac computer? The first set of submitted files I compressed using a sharewire tar / gzip compressor (iArchive). I tried to submit the data again after compressing the .qual and .fasta files into a tar.gz archive using the

GNU tar command line application in Mac OS X, and I got the same initial error as the first submission (i.e. the upload system sees two

sequence files ._BC2ANME2_454-reads.fasta and BC2ANME2_454- reads.fasta) while there is only actually one sequence file in the tar.gz archive.

Do you have any recommendations for how I should compress the files

to get rid of this problem?

Thank you, ---Isaac

On Apr 29, 2009, at 11:57 AM, Mark D'Souza wrote:

...

Hi,

I'm afraid the MG-RAST jobs you recently submitted (3283, 3284, 3285) have failed. It looks like the sequence and quality files have

...

been tarred separately and then tarred (and gzipped) together a second time and the system was unable to figure out how to handle these files. Please resubmit each job as a tarred gzipped file containing the plain text fasta and quality files.

Thanks, Mark D'Souza -- for the MG-RAST team

[email protected] http://metagenomics.nmpdr.org/dsouza