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When I run command steam in the terminal it gives me this error.

$ steam
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
xz: (stdin): File format not recognized
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
find: ‘/home/jacob/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime’: No such file or directory

and when I click on the icon it tries to open for a few seconds and then goes away.

Sumeet Deshmukh
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Jacub
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2 Answers2

25

Simply open terminal and type:

mkdir /home/$USER/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime

This creates the missing directory, it worked for me when I had exactly the same error in 17.04.

Belgaerix
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1

For me got around it with $ rm -rf ~/.steam FWIW :)

This is like the "global nuke option" see the comments below:

rogerdpack
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    This deletes all of the user data for steam. I would not be surprised if this would wipe not only configurations and settings but game save files as well. – Nmath Nov 24 '20 at 01:13
  • And the games themselves too probably. But if it comes to it... :) – rogerdpack Nov 24 '20 at 17:56
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    Don't you think that might be something you'd put as a warning before advising other people to run this command? People often put hours and days into game saves. It's really not clear why this even answers the question that was asked. There's a lot under this folder. Surely there's a more targeted way to do the same thing that doesn't delete all user files? – Nmath Nov 24 '20 at 18:02
  • I'm not sure what all is stored in this folder, but this is my first time installing/starting steam on this device so probably not much, and it solved my issue, so thanks. I probably wouldn't recommend this if you don't know exactly what's in the folder. – Hellreaver May 14 '23 at 01:03