> if gnu tar proprietary? No. I think Laslo meant 'proprietary' as in 'ad hoc' or 'incompatible' (with standard implementations).
> there's probably no way to implement those GNU-extensions in a good and > suckless way. The FSF has the bad habit for their > standard-implementations that they tend to add everything including the > kitchen sink which might as well be easily handled by other standard > tools (think of "cat -v" for example). While I generally agree with Laslo, I'm in favor of supporting *a select few* of GNU tar's extensions. Granted, most of them are pretty niche (insane), like support for files that span over multiple volumes. But there's at least one useful extension: Long file name support. That extension is also what Cág's error message "unsupported tar-filetype L" is about. I'm pretty confident that, with this extension alone, you would be able to at least extract most GNU tar archives. I could try writing a patch for this, if people are interested. Cheers, Thomas