If you encounter the following error while running tar command, the most likely reason is that you do not have read permission on one of the files you are trying to archive with tar.
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
Then how can we pin down the file(s) causing the errors, or identify any other cause?
The tar command should actually print out what those "previous errors" are, but you can easily miss printed error messages if you run tar in verbose mode (e.g., -cvf). To catch error messages more easily, you can filter out tar's stdout messages as follows.
$ tar cvzfz backup.tgz my_program/ > /dev/null
You will then see only error messages sent by tar to stderr.
