On 09  Sep 20, at 19:31 , Denys Vlasenko wrote:
On Sunday 20 September 2009 23:51, Peter Renzland wrote:
It appears ironic that Snow Leopard, "The World's most advanced OS",
has switched to the POSIX tar format, which according to BusyBox
terminology requires "OLDGNU_COMPATIBILITY".

I do not think that POSIX says that there must be trailing space in those fields.

It appears that POSIX did say that there *may* be terminating spaces (or NULL characters).
From the NetBSD manual page for tar(5):

        POSIX requires numeric fields to be zero-padded in
the front, and allows them to be terminated with either space or NUL
    characters.

It's more likely that whoever was implementing tar
for Snow Leopard just "reused" code from some oldish tar
which was creating such fields, without much thinking why
this old code does that, and whether it makes sense
to continue to do that.

Since there is no longer a current POSIX tar standard, perhaps it might make sense to create a Busybox term:

"NEW APPLE COMPATIBILITY" which is equivalent to "OLDGNU COMPATIBILITY".

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