hi .. does this happen on one tar file only? it was "man tar"
ok, so this is one file being corrupt.
file-system has a problem (which file system do you have, btw?), reiserfs
maybe a bug in the fs code? i'm not expirenced enough to tell, really.
file was partly overwritten accidently, maybe your system was compromised what kind of attack should show the symptom ?
uhm .. someone wanting to make fun, an attack that would cause the fs to corrupt random data - or someone leaving a "signature" as artists do? i told you that my guess would be a software problem like buggy applications or errors in the fs' structure.
look into the man-files content with an editor of your choice (i prefer vi). It's curious, that the formation and some word's are ok. but random charakters are not.
but the formation is stored in a man file too, wouldn't it be corrupted too if the block were gone?
harddiscs may die silently, cauze more and more blocks gets corrupted and you'll never see it - the os marks them as defect and goes on. [...]
true. but it will notify you. i had a damaged hard-disk with win2k and i got quite some entries in the eventlog saying that a block got corrupted (although i didn't get a message box). i have never had this with linux yet, but i bet the system will generate appropriate syslog entries.
memtest86 may show failures, but how i wrote, its an manpage, that was one time written to disk - on setup of the box ?
although i didn't suggest this, it is a good idea. if your memory is failing you never know what might happen. michael