Horst wrote,
> Ahh -- Octal ! "twelve-characer octal strings". I used my hex viewer to
>look at a very simple tar file before posting, but couldn't make sence of
>it.
On my system (a full install of Slackware 12.1), I found a description of
the tar format in the file /usr/include/tar.h. (You might or might not
find this file on other distributions, and it might be necessary to
install some -devel packages to get it...on Slackware it's part of the
glibc package.)
The format described in /usr/include/tar.h appears to be the default
format used by GNU tar. GNU tar also supports several other historical
tar formats that differ slightly from each other in the size and
formatting of various header fields, but if memory serves, the date/time
format is always a classic UNIX timestamp (a count of seconds since
midnight, January 1, 1970), and most formats store it as a 12-character
octal string.
- Neil Parker
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