Thanks for the patches, they look good to me be I'll do a proper review this weekend if nobody else did before. Cheers!
It is worth nothing that I also talked to mcf off list and he said getting a finished implementation of pax might be an even better option as that is a posix standard we don't implement. The idea would then be to share the code from pax and tar somehow.
Before that happens it might be relatively harmless to merge these though. thanks :)
