tar command on does not automatically detect the compression type of an archive

Issue

Extracting files from an archive, or inspecting the contents of an archive fail when

• the archive is compressed
• the archive is very small
• and the compression type is not explicitly specified, so autodetect functionality is attempting to be used

The commands for extracting/inspecting are tar tfv <filename> or tar xfv <filename>. Following error message (or localized equivalents) are output:

 tar: This does not look like a tar archive
 tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors