tar: corrupted octal value in tar header (Apple Snow Leopard)

[Peter Renzland]

On 09  Sep 20, at 19:31 , Denys Vlasenko wrote:
On Sunday 20 September 2009 23:51, Peter Renzland wrote:
>> It appears ironic that Snow Leopard, "The World's most advanced OS",
>> has switched to the POSIX tar format, which according to BusyBox
>> terminology requires "OLDGNU_COMPATIBILITY".
>
> I do not think that POSIX says that there must be trailing space in  
> those fields.

It appears that POSIX did say that there *may* be terminating spaces  
(or NULL characters).
 From the NetBSD manual page for tar(5):

         POSIX requires numeric fields to be zero-padded in
     the front, and allows them to be terminated with either space or  
NUL
     characters.

> It's more likely that whoever was implementing tar
> for Snow Leopard just "reused" code from some oldish tar
> which was creating such fields, without much thinking why
> this old code does that, and whether it makes sense
> to continue to do that.

Since there is no longer a current POSIX tar standard, perhaps it  
might make sense to create a Busybox term:

"NEW APPLE COMPATIBILITY" which is equivalent to "OLDGNU COMPATIBILITY".