I'm confused about/by tar - (nf)
jejones at ea.UUCP
jejones at ea.UUCP
Sat Sep 8 04:45:00 AEST 1984
#N:ea:13400014:000:1144
ea!jejones Sep 7 13:45:00 1984
In view of previous notes on tar, I post this with some trepidation, but...
1. In one spot on the manual page, it says the (numeric) fields are
zero-filled octal numbers. Elsewhere, it says the checksum field
is a decimal ASCII number. (It turns out that the first statement
is nearest being right, but the fields aren't zero-filled (found
by experimentation); instead there are spaces where one might expect
zeroes.)
2. Am I correct in interpreting previous notes as saying that only Berkeley
tar uses a terminating / in the name to indicate a directory? (I'm
writing a tool that will read and split up tar files, and if I have
to interpret the mode to tell if a file is a directory, so be it; I
just want to make sure.)
3. Documentation says that linkflag is one of the characters '0', '1',
or '2'. Experimentation says that for "normal" files, linkflag is
'\0'. So what values correspond to the documentation's '1' and '2'?
For completeness's sake, I should say that my experimentation has been
on a machine running 4.2. Any information about what tar really does
would be appreciated.
James Jones
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