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Star (Unix) was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 04 June 2011 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Tar (computing). The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here. |
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The article states "12 bytes reserved for storing the file size, only 11 octal digits can be stored. This gives a maximum file size of 8 gigabytes on archived files." This seems to be in error, 11 decimal digits is 99,999,999,999 Bytes. 99,999,999,999 /1024 =~ 97,656,249 KBytes. 97,656,249 / 1000 =~ 97,656 MegaBytes. 97,656 /1000 =~ 97 GigaBytes. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.66.238.27 (talk) 13:27, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
Format UID File Size File Name Devn gnu 1.8e19 Unlimited Unlimited 63 oldgnu 1.8e19 Unlimited Unlimited 63 v7 2097151 8GB 99 n/a ustar 2097151 8GB 256 21 posix Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/tar/Formats.html 194.66.238.27 (talk) 19:29, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
Please Please Please add these examples back to the main tar page! Do you have no idea how useful it is?
This is the most useful information of this computer program. These simple command examples perform a service while the discussion of compression formats is more arcane knowledge whose usefulness is rare indeed. We don't need a man page - but the simple command line examples are advantageous. If we dont keep them on the wiki page, i would like to at least reference them here. I agree! this is the first time i've seen a wiki page get more useless. Whenever i wanted to know how to use tar, I would simply look it up on wiki. now the page serves no purpose.
Some simple examples of using the Tar program.
To create a Tar file
Creates a GZIP-compressed Tar file named eglinux.tar.gz of all files with a .txt suffix:
tar -czvf eglinux.tar.gz *.txt
To list files in a compressed Tar file
tar -tf eglinux.tar.gz
To extract files from a Tar file
Extracts all files from a compressed Tar file named eglinux.tar.gz.
tar -xvf eglinux.tar.gz
Extracts to a specific folder:
tar -xvf eglinux.tar.gz -C ~/des
Other versions of Tar may require the -z option to specify the compression type. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.52.70.60 (talk) 15:46, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
This article is about the tar format -- not the tar program. Command options to a program seems to me to be useless when discussing a file format. FrederikHertzum (talk) 12:40, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
Fred that is like saying it is useless to describe or even acknowledge baking when discussing cake. The command utility is main methodology to create a tar file. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.19.16.50 (talk) 14:23, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
+1 for adding examples. Who'd have thought the talk page would be more useful than the main page... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.183.113.131 (talk) 09:00, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
+1 for re-adding examples! Why has this most useful information been removed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.10.60.85 (talk) 14:35, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
+1 for putting examples back. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.236.134.251 (talk) 17:05, 27 January 2011 (UTC)
+1 for adding them back, quite useful indeed and a good case of how to apply the format [[[Special:Contributions/62.96.36.158|62.96.36.158]] (talk) 10:00, 25 July 2011 (UTC)]
Again, examples for the linux specific tar command would be on it's own separate page, just as information on photoshop tools would not be on a page about the JPEG format. In any case, examples of CLI commands are not encyclopaedic — Preceding unsigned comment added by 49.194.90.184 (talk) 07:28, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
I wouldn't remove information from a wiki page that tens of thousands of people use as a reference, ie the command line examples in this tar article. One tar page can contain both pedantic information as well as command line examples. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.4.49.44 (talk) 17:59, 8 February 2009 (UTC)
Some irony that an article called Tar file format manages to say exactly nothing about the Tar file format. ==Tagishsimon (talk)
I would suggest "tar (utility)" to describe the command-line utility and "tar (file format)" to describe the format. In particular, there are many programs that read and write tar formats that are not the tar utility. This includes various GUI archiving tools, for example. It also includes other tools that are not general-purpose archivers, such as the FreeBSD package tools, which use tar format. (I believe RPM is based on cpio format and Deb uses ar format, but I can't remember exactly.) It's also worth noting that many command-line tar programs can read and write archive formats other than the tar format. Tim Kientzle 00:17, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
I never knew about ar before I came to Wikipedia. But now that I do, why is tar used instead of ar? :)--Chealer 22:58, 2005 Apr 1 (UTC)
This article is somewhat of a tutorial to a user of the specific tool in a specific operating system. Moreover words like "Whoops" and examples make this article both lengthy as well below-par. Please consider conformance, or put a ((cleanup|January 2006)) tag to notify people who use this as an encyclopedia and not as a man-page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dormant25 (talk • contribs) 06:53, 3 January 2006
It looks like we have a reference to i.e. that should be e.g. Is there really only one way that tarbombs would have improper file structure? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.183.113.131 (talk) 08:57, 20 January 2010 (UTC)
The vast majority of instances of the "tar" program that one is likely to encounter now include the "z" (compress) option. Thus the discussion about why this is a bad idea is kind of silly. Tim Bray 05:22, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
Does anybody know where the word tarball comes from? --Lionel H. Grillet 12:36, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
I've added an additional file extension, .war, which are Konqueror web archives. Due to the possibility of confusion with Java archives (also .war) I think this needs a citation.
There are throw-away comments on the web that ".war files are renamed .tar.gz" files, especially on KDE discussion lists, and I believe that they are reliable, because I have played with .war files and satisfied myself that they actually are tar files, compressed with gzip. E.g. tar -xzf archive.war
will extract the files from one. Problem is, I can't find an authorative source to cite. Maybe the KDE source code?
Also, there are incorrect references on some mailing lists that .war files are "zip files". I've also seen posts made on KDE mailing lists suggesting that Konq should/will use .wtz instead of .war, but I haven't seen any evidence that was ever any more than a proposal.
Assistence in finding an authoritive source to cite will be appreciated. Limeguin 15:21, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
If my understanding is correct, BSD tar does not need an external program to handle gzip/gunzip, but rather uses the libarchive library it is a wrapper for. If this is in fact the case, the article should be corrected, but I cannot find any documentation that explicitly states that no external program is called. Jimmy hartzell 17:29, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
Additionally, BSD tar does not really exists. The major BSDs all have their own versions of tar. The OpenBSD version, for example, does not support -j --David Chisnall 17:31, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
I thought this section was really useful and think it should be put back. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 164.165.217.254 (talk) 23:36, 30 March 2007 (UTC).
I've noticed that Tgz is a redirect to this article, but there is no mention of those three letters anywhere in the article. That's not good. I don't know much about tar, but this should be fixed by someone. -- 199.60.2.105 20:15, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
The sentence "The end of an archive is marked by at least two consecutive zero-filled blocks." under "Format details" is correct, but gives an incomplete picture of the total size of a tar file.
Per GNU info pages, in addition to having two full blocks of zeros at the end of it, an archive is padded with more zeros as required to make its size a multiple of a "record". A record is a group of blocks, typically 20, which get written to tape in one shot with no spaces between them. The number of blocks can be changed by using the -b option.
The result is that by default, the smallest archive is quite big (10240 bytes), which is interesting and surprising. Daniel Romaniuk 03:07, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
bash-3.00$ touch blah bash-3.00$ tar cvf blah.tar blah a blah 0K bash-3.00$ ls -liah | grep blah 660304 -rw------- 1 cc199700 staff 0 Jun 21 09:44 blah 661202 -rw------- 1 cc199700 staff 1.5K Jun 21 09:44 blah.tar
The article claims that early tape drives only supported 512-byte blocks. This is clearly incorrect for the vast majority of early tape drives, and in fact tar usually wrote 10240-byte tape records. The tape drive and its formatter (controller) had no idea that the 10240-byte record was divided into any smaller unit (block) by the software.
There is probably some good reason that the format was originally designed to use 512-byte blocks, and it might even be due to a limitation of some particular tape drive, but the blanket claim is false and needs to be corrected or removed. I added a 'fact' tag for now, but will remove the claim if support or clarification is not forthcoming. --Brouhaha 18:47, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
Can anybody tell me how to download this file? --WikiCats (talk) 13:47, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
In the examples in this article there's usage of "-" (minus sign) before the paramters. In some systems it doesn't work with minus sign... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.74.120.200 (talk) 09:03, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Gnu tar and PAX both supports sparse files. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Athulin (talk • contribs) 19:46, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
The format tables should include the file offsets in hexadecimal not (only) in decimal. Hexadecimal offsets are widely used while decimal ones are kind of exotic. Common Unix-Tools like hexdump or xxd do not support the display of decimal offsets. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Martin scharrer (talk • contribs) 15:52, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
I have looked around, and never found a tar struct that has 156 name bytes. They are all 100, and no single byte after that. I don't want to change the page if I am wrong, but could someone else back me up and change it? At the very least it is confusing what it means to convey. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.50.65.6 (talk) 20:26, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
Really? This got introduced as copying files, it would be playing hardball (tardball?) on the same computer. "cp -a" is not good enough? I think the main point is left out where you have no other connection between two systems just a simple pipe, like "tar c | nc -lp 8888 -q 0" on one computer and "nc 192.168.0.2 8888 | tar x" on the other. Cf. Hay (talk) 12:57, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
Shortly after tarpipe (which is very useful) is mentioned, the DAR author's promotion of their utility-ive-never-heard-of mentions the lack of central index as a limitation rather than a design decision. The lack of central index is _why_ you it's easy to generate tarballs in a streaming fashion. The "zip" file format has existed alongside tar (via the info-zip package) for the entire history of Linux, which is coming up on 30 years at this point, and the IETF standardized it as RFC 1951 in 1996. The primary difference between tgz and .zip is the absence/presence or absence of the central directory index.
Wikipedia is no playground for advertizing your favorite OS.
You did not introduce new information as there are already pointers to useful and complete information. http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/man/star/star.4.html lists the standard and vendor unique extensions and the standard http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pax.html gives complete standard information that is not biased like yours.
Please follow the Wikipedia rules, do not introduce advertizing and do not add non-helpful partial information altough the complete information is available from the article already. --Schily (talk) 10:12, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
This arcitle talks about 'tarballs' and only later on explains that this is an alternative term for a tar file. 'tarball' needs to be defined before it is used. 109.150.205.103 (talk) 22:56, 2 April 2012 (UTC)
Currently the article reads “A tar file is the concatenation of one or more files”. For me it was too easy to read as “. . . one or more tar files”, but I understand that you cannot simply append the contents of one Tar file to the end of another because there is a special end-of-file marker in the middle. Instead I think the sentence is just trying to say something like the files stored within an archive are joined together. Can we find a better way to express this? Maybe replacing “tar file” with “archive”? Vadmium (talk, contribs) 12:24, 14 April 2012 (UTC).
You mention the magic code defined in POSIX, yet on Linux (or any GNU tar supported platform) the magic code is "ustar \0" (the letters "ustar" followed by two spaces and a null byte.)
Since you mention GNU tar, it may be a good idea to mention the proper magic for the tool (or at least mention that the POSIX magic is not followed 100%.)
Alexis Wilke (talk) 05:13, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
The article says now there are advanced tool that can create index file for tar file and optionally append it to a tar file. I googled for half an hour not being able to find a tool to index tar file, not to mention to integrate the index into the archive. Is it just me? Or there should be a reference link, if there is even on such a tool at all. 张韡武 (talk) 06:27, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
Rational provided for ASCII is nonsense:
″To ensure portability across different architectures with different byte orderings, the information in the header record is encoded in ASCII″
Might be better rational would be:
Hi! I'm an occasional wikipedian, and a while ago the subject of the 'ustar' acronym for POSIX tar archives came up, and we wondered what it might expand to. Some googling revealed two conflicting expansions, and it wasn't really obvious which one was correct, so I did some digging to try to find the origin of the acronym. In the end the oldest reference to "Uniform Standard TApe Archive" that I could find was when it was added to this article in 2006, whereas I could find BSD manpages (that seem more authoritative on the subject than a random Wikipedia edit, for sure) from 2004 giving the "Unix Standard TAR" expansion for the acronym. With that in mind, I decided to edit the acronym expansion per WP:BOLD, citing a 2004 manpage (thus predating any mention I could find of "Uniform Standard TApe Archive", but since this proved to be a bit controversial (apparently, judging by the edit history) I thought it'd be a good idea to provide more links explaning this change here.
This is all admittedly a rather trivial matter, but since a lot of places (including .edu pages) provide the seemingly incorrect acronym expansion citing Wikipedia, I'd like to put a stop to the misinformation.
Here's what I'm basing this on:
I feel a bit silly for writing all this, but I just want to avoid spreading misinformation… hopefully this is enough rationale to explain why I changed what I did. —FireFly~ 13:03, 18 May 2017 (UTC)
star was first published in 1997 (see newsgroup posting). According to its developer, star was 15 years older than that. There are no independent reliable sources giving this older date; all "third party" sources which do this are quoting from the developer's comments. TEDickey (talk) 00:04, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
The source was first provided in April 1997. TEDickey (talk) 10:05, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Given the available information, the statement in Wikipedia should be reworded to point out the initial announcement, publication dates with a parenthetical comment that the developer stated that he'd begun the program much earlier. There's no way that I can see to determine what features he copied or adapted from other, previously-published implementations, since there's a 6-7 year interval between the other programs and this one. TEDickey (talk) 10:09, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
Source-archives are useful reliable sources, but manual pages making self-promotional claims need something more. A dated newsgroup posting also is useful -- for establishing what someone said at a given point in time (but not for determining whether it is an accurate statement). Wikipedia is supposed to be based on reliable sources, not on speculation, inferences, etc. TEDickey (talk) 10:21, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
I have readded examples of use that were removed in August 2020. They are reasonably short and give a quick impression. A quick glance at Wikipedia command pages shows there are very often examples of use so I do not believe the actual policy is "remove all examples of use of commands since Wikipedia is not a manual". If, on the other hand, this is the actual policy, there should better be explicit evidence of consensus about it such as a vote or request for comments, and then we have some pretty trivial work to do: go through categories of pages for commands and systematically remove all usage examples. --Dan Polansky (talk) 15:53, 11 July 2022 (UTC)