Assume the following situation:

• a healthy and uncompressed tar file: a.tar
• the metadata of the 1st and second files within the archive start at
  positions 0 and 756 (realistic example values)

I partially damage 200 bytes of metadata (byte range 0-500) of the first
archived file:

f = open("a.tar", "rb+")
f.seek(100)
f.write("0"*200)

Now, I seek to the start of the 2nd archived file's metadata:

f.seek(756)

And I try to open the tar archive using tarfile.open() passing the
previous fileobject to it.

import tarfile
f_tar = tarfile.open(fileobj=f)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "tarfile.py", line 1143, in open
    raise ReadError("file could not be opened successfully")
tarfile.ReadError: file could not be opened successfully

Wouldn't the expected behaviour be to successfully open the tar archive
at offset 756?

It seems that tarfile.open(fileobj=f) seeks to position 0 of the
fileobject f, fails to read the 1st archived file's metadata and throws
an exception.

I fixed this in the trunk (r59260) and release25-maint branch (r59261).
Thanks for the report. If you cannot wait for the next release, I
recommend you use mode "r|" as a workaround.

BTW, 756 is absolutely no realistic example value for the position of
the second member. A header block must start on a 512-byte boundary.

Thanks for the quick fix and the workaround.

You are right about position 756. I hadn't spent enough time studying
the ''ustar'' format.