IMP-00037: Character set marker unknown

                   IMP-00037: Character set marker unknown

Today while i was doing a migration from a 9i database 11g R2 database i received the error  IMP-00037 : Character Set marker unknown and the import terminated .

Here is how i rectified the issue .

SOURCE BOX : AIX 

TARGET BOX : Linux 

This issue usually arises  when the dump is corrupted .

In my case the it wasn't the corruption. 

To reduce the file size the dump file is compressed by the Unix COMPRESS utility .

In the Linux server (target) i did not un-compress  it , so the import failed . 

To resolve this i used the GUNZIP Linux utility and the re-imported the data and it completed successfully .