Octal! Indeed. I can only guess that it's octal because that makes the conversion to/from binary slightly simpler. But it's still not as simple as you think, because the PDP-11 has a 16 bit word, and it take 5 1/3 digits to store 16 bits. The 11-digit octal number would hold 33 bits, so it was probably stored in memory as a 32 bit number. Tar may or may not have preceded the "long int" type in C, which would have hidden that complexity.
I *think* I recall that tar wasn't in 6th Edition Unix. It was new with 7th Edition. Or maybe not. It's really hard for me to imagine the mindset that would specify an external format based on saving a couple of instructions reading and writing it. And I was there at the time. Tar was actually an advance over older formats because it used ASCII instead of binary fields, thus avoiding endian issues. On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:14 PM, horst <ho...@freeshell.org> wrote: > >> Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:03:57 -0800 (PST) >> From: Neil Parker <npar...@lyl.llx.com> >> Subject: Re: [Eug-lug] ls script help > > ...> >> >> timestamps. "tar", for example, archives only one-second-resolution >> timestamps, as twelve-characer octal strings...this is mandated by a POSIX >> standard, and for the sake of backward compatibilty is unlikely to change >> anytime soon. > > 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. > Thanks to both Neil and Bob! -- I found this was a really educational > thread. > > ----------- > > Back to Mr. O's original question, and using 'find' at the core of the > answer. > I just found a cool web-GUI to build more complex find commands (w/o RTFM): > http://find.unixpin.com/ > > Enjoy...............................Horst > _______________________________________________ > EUGLUG mailing list > euglug@euglug.org > http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug > -- Bob Miller K<bob> k...@jogger-egg.com _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list euglug@euglug.org http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
