Chef on Windows Error: tar: Cannot fork:…

Chef on Windows Error: tar: Cannot fork: Function not implemented (Solved)

Feb 5, 2013 in code and technology

I’m diving into the fun world of Chef. But I’m doing it on Windows, which has been…not smooth. Here’s my latest error:

C:\Users\mharen\Code\chef-repo>knife cookbook site install getting-started
Installing getting-started to C:/Users/mharen/Code/chef-repo/cookbooks
Checking out the master branch.
Pristine copy branch (chef-vendor-getting-started) exists, switching to it.
Downloading getting-started from the cookbooks site at version 0.4.0 to C:/Users/mharen/Code/chef-repo/cookbooks/getting-started.tar.gz
Cookbook saved: C:/Users/mharen/Code/chef-repo/cookbooks/getting-started.tar.gz
Removing pre-existing version.
Uncompressing getting-started version 0.4.0.
ERROR: Mixlib::ShellOut::ShellCommandFailed: **Expected process to exit with [0], but received '2'**
---- Begin output of tar zxvf C:/Users/mharen/Code/chef-repo/cookbooks/getting-started.tar.gz ----
STDOUT:
STDERR: tar: Cannot fork: Function not implemented
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
---- End output of tar zxvf C:/Users/mharen/Code/chef-repo/cookbooks/getting-started.tar.gz ----
Ran tar zxvf C:/Users/mharen/Code/chef-repo/cookbooks/getting-started.tar.gz returned 2

Lame. After wasting an embarrassingly large amount of time on this issue, I figured it out: I had multiple installs of the tar command:

C:\Users\mharen\Code\chef-repo>which -a tar
C:\Program Files (x86)\Gow\bin\tar.EXE
C:\chef\bin\tar.EXE
c:\Git\bin\tar.EXE

And apparently some of them suck. Hard. Since I’m playing with Chef, let’s just use that one—it probably works. This was as easy as updating my PATH variable to place c:\chef\bin at the beginning instead of the end (really just before the others found by which).

Once you fix the path, close and reopen your cmd window and try the command again:

C:\Users\mharen\Code\chef-repo>which -a tar
C:\chef\bin\tar.EXE
c:\Git\bin\tar.EXE
C:\Program Files (x86)\Gow\bin\tar.EXE

C:\Users\mharen\Code\chef-repo>knife cookbook site install getting-started
Installing getting-started to C:/Users/mharen/Code/chef-repo/cookbooks
Checking out the master branch.
Pristine copy branch (chef-vendor-getting-started) exists, switching to it.
Downloading getting-started from the cookbooks site at version 0.4.0 to C:/Users/mharen/Code/chef-repo/cookbooks/getting-started.tar.gz
Cookbook saved: C:/Users/mharen/Code/chef-repo/cookbooks/getting-started.tar.gz
Removing pre-existing version.
Uncompressing getting-started version 0.4.0.
removing downloaded tarball
1 files updated, committing changes
Creating tag cookbook-site-imported-getting-started-0.4.0
Checking out the master branch.
Updating b5a1d0d..42a8168
Fast-forward
 cookbooks/getting-started/README.rdoc              |  4 +++
 cookbooks/getting-started/attributes/default.rb    |  1 +
 cookbooks/getting-started/metadata.json            | 29 ++++++++++++++++++++++
 cookbooks/getting-started/metadata.rb              |  6 +++++
 cookbooks/getting-started/recipes/default.rb       | 23 +++++++++++++++++
 .../templates/default/chef-getting-started.txt.erb |  5 ++++
 6 files changed, 68 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 cookbooks/getting-started/README.rdoc
 create mode 100644 cookbooks/getting-started/attributes/default.rb
 create mode 100644 cookbooks/getting-started/metadata.json
 create mode 100644 cookbooks/getting-started/metadata.rb
 create mode 100644 cookbooks/getting-started/recipes/default.rb
 create mode 100644 cookbooks/getting-started/templates/default/chef-getting-started.txt.erb
Cookbook getting-started version 0.4.0 successfully installed

C:\Users\mharen\Code\chef-repo>

All fixed :)