pax/ustar not properly handling long pathnames

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 11:02, Matt Morgan wrote:

> Do people just not use ustar? I opted for it because it seemed the
> most basic of the archive formats that is both a) POSIX-compliant and
> b) supports longer filenames. I could try xstar, which is
> near-compliant. But I work with a lot of museums, and they like
> standards (they tend to think very long-term).

I think if you were really concerned about portability you'd
cd to a point where the path wouldn't be so long anyway.  I've
always been happy with gnutar's non-standard format since
gnutar itself is fairly portable and can be installed about
anywhere you might want it if it isn't already there.  The
author of star is very pedantic about being able to output
a strictly standard format but in practice that would only
matter if you run across a platform that had a program that
handled the ustar format correctly (which as you've seen
isn't common) and could not run gnutar.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com