After all these years, it is not that easy to say why the decision to swallow this exception was made. One part surely was a lack of experience with the tar format itself and all of its implementations. The other part I guess was that it was supposed to avoid problems in case users did not use TarFile as an iterator. tarfile was developed on Python 2.2 which was the first release to feature iterators. The problem if you do random access on a tarfile or call TarFile.getmembers() is that first of all all the headers must be collected. If this fails somewhere in the middle, there is no way to resume the current operation and you get nothing out of the archive.