Hi, I have found that if creating a USTAR archive using
gtar --format=ustar -cf .... the resulting archive might not unpack correctly using some other TAR implementations, those I have tried that failed are AIX 5.3 HP-UX 11.11, 11.23, 11.31 Solaris 8, 9, 10, 11 SCO OpenServer 6 I tried the small snippet below. The created TAR files were distributed to the AIX, HP-UX and other hosts, and I unpacked it there with the TAR that came with that operating system. If I packed with GNU TAR 1.22 they could not unpack it correctly (only the top directory was created), if packed with Solaris TAR all could unpack it, even GNU TAR. # I try be as nice as I can, 98 + 20 + 77 should be within USTAR # format limits even if one or two chars are wasted on '\0' or the # '/' delimiter a=aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa b=bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb c=ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc rm -fr $a mkdir -p $a/$b touch $a/$b/$c # GNU TAR gtar --format=ustar -cf gnu.tar $a # Solaris TAR /usr/bin/tar -cf solaris.tar $a Do I do something wrong, or is this a bug in GNU tar? If a bug, is this corrected in some later version of GNU TAR? If just different interpretations of the USTAR standard, is there some magic environment variable to set to get GNU tar to create archives fully compatible with the other TAR implementations mentioned above? kent -- Kent Boortz, Senior Production Engineer Sun Microsystems Inc., the MySQL team Office: +46 863 11 363 Mobile: +46 70 279 11 71
