[email protected] wrote: > There seems to be an interchange problem between star and GNU tar, > possibly related to sparse file support. Or perhaps this is just a bug in > GNU tar? > > I'm using star 1.5 and the problem happened with both GNU tar 1.22 (my > Linux distribution's provided version) and 1.25 which I compiled from > source. > > I created an archive using star: > $ star -no-fifo -v -c f=archive.tar artype=xustar -numeric -sparse filename > > The archive created by star was a multiple of 10KB in size; 3,666,155,520 > bytes. Both star and GNU tar extract the file from archive.tar correctly. > However, after extraction GNU tar reports: > tar: Unexpected EOF in archive > tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
If GNU tar archives sparse files, it creates archives that violate the POSIX structuring conventions for TAR archives. If you tell star to create a GNU tar archive, it creates a TAR archive with the same structuring defetcs as GNU tar expects. If you tell star to create a POSIX compliant archive, it however creates an archive that follows the POSIX TAR structuring conventions and that as a result will not be understood by GNU tar. Jörg -- EMail:[email protected] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin [email protected] (uni) [email protected] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
