Unfortunately Apple decided to remove /usr/bin/gnutar from Maverick (Mac OSX 10.9). This is a pain because most of the tarring I do on my mac is to transfer the file to a GNU based linux (e.g. Debian/Ubuntu). Apple's bsd-tar is not compatible with gnu-tar.
This is my solution:
brew install gnu-tar
cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s /usr/local/opt/gnu-tar/libexec/gnubin/tar gnutar