@Nicholas_Bokulich As an update, I went and re-downloaded the files and sorted out ones that might be problematic, and was extremely thorough (the amazing person that maintains the Stanford cluster I'm using helped me to do the best job possible)...and I still get the same error.
This time when I ran
echo $LC_ALL
echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL was empty, so I set it using: export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 and then tried again and I still got the same error.
Do you have any suggestions?
Update 2--
for f in untarred/*.gz; do grep $'x8b' $f; done
several matched, so I'm going to take them out and try again.
Update 3--
got the same error again. I'm going to search again for the bad character in the unzipped files and will update you.