jejones@ea.UUCP (09/07/84)
#N:ea:13400014:000:1144 ea!jejones Sep 7 13:45:00 1984 In view of previous notes on tar, I post this with some trepidation, but... 1. In one spot on the manual page, it says the (numeric) fields are zero-filled octal numbers. Elsewhere, it says the checksum field is a decimal ASCII number. (It turns out that the first statement is nearest being right, but the fields aren't zero-filled (found by experimentation); instead there are spaces where one might expect zeroes.) 2. Am I correct in interpreting previous notes as saying that only Berkeley tar uses a terminating / in the name to indicate a directory? (I'm writing a tool that will read and split up tar files, and if I have to interpret the mode to tell if a file is a directory, so be it; I just want to make sure.) 3. Documentation says that linkflag is one of the characters '0', '1', or '2'. Experimentation says that for "normal" files, linkflag is '\0'. So what values correspond to the documentation's '1' and '2'? For completeness's sake, I should say that my experimentation has been on a machine running 4.2. Any information about what tar really does would be appreciated. James Jones