Hi,

It is not at all clear what you are trying to do.

I suggest you run:

tar -xvf PSC_2204_images.tar  1>out.txt  2>err.txt

All of the output and errors will be in the two .txt files and not on the screen.

This will actually be faster.

You can then edit the text files with vi like:

vi out.txt

Trying to cut'n'paste 19 thousand characters from your terminal screen is always likely to have problems. In this case, I would guess that the file names includes control characters that that can't be included in the text.
For example, the NULL character.

Hope this helps, Cheers Nigel