On Sunday, October 29, 2023 12:40:06 AM CEST RVP wrote: > On Sat, 28 Oct 2023, Mouse wrote: > > I'm having trouble seeing what's responsible, and in particular am > > wondering whether this is my bug or /bin/tar's bug or what. (It > > doesn't help that I haven't managed to find a clear spec for tar > > format; the closest I've found so far is a description of what pax, in > > its (supposedly-)tar-compatible mode, is supposed to read/write.) > > All of this can be found in: > > src/external/bsd/libarchive/dist/libarchive/ archive_read_support_format_tar.c
There is even a man page going over many of the variants and the details. > Maybe your tar could supply a "ustar" magic char. seq. at 0x101 for > libarchive. (see: header_ustar() vs. header_old_tar()) I don't think any one else cares about pre-ustar. Pretty much any reader and writer around uses at least ustar and generally wants to have extended POSIX as well when caring about large files. I see no reasons for adding random hacks for outdated tar programs with little real world exposure, changes are high it is going to break something with other archives. Joerg
