Hi bug-tar, If I use --mtime=1970-01-01 on a machine set to CET (UTC+1), tar will create a file where the mtime field contains non-ASCII bytes and no null character: see the ffff ... f1f0 bytes in the dump below. I've tested with 1.27.1 and 1.29.
I'd expect tar to emit an error. I discovered this because Python's tarfile module fails to open such files with "invalid header", since it expects this field to contain an ASCII number, as described in the docs: The mtime field is the data modification time of the file at the time it > was archived. It is the ASCII representation of the octal value of the last > time the file's contents were modified, represented as an integer number of > seconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00 Coordinated Universal Time. > Thanks in advance, Rodrigo Queiro > date Thu Nov 16 13:31:44 CET 2017 > echo > testfile > tar cf test.tar --mtime 1970-01-01 testfile > xxd test.tar | head 00000000: 7465 7374 6669 6c65 0000 0000 0000 0000 testfile........ 00000010: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................ 00000020: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................ 00000030: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................ 00000040: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................ 00000050: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................ 00000060: 0000 0000 3030 3030 3634 3000 3133 3133 ....0000640.1313 00000070: 3535 3500 3030 3131 3631 3000 3030 3030 555.0011610.0000 00000080: 3030 3030 3030 3100 *ffff ffff ffff ffff* 0000001......... 00000090: *ffff f1f0* 3031 3636 3432 0020 3000 0000 ....016642. 0... -- Google Germany GmbH | Erika-Mann-Strasse | 80636 Muenchen | Germany AG Hamburg, HRB 86891 | Sitz der Gesellschaft: Hamburg | Geschäftsführer: Paul Manicle, Halimah DeLaine Prado
