> >Our pax seems to be sensitive to bugs in gtar that gtar is not
> >sensitive to. I think it would be good if someone fixed it so that it
> >was more liberal in what it accepted...
> 
> Actually this has been discussed many times in the PR system. There is some
> archiver that produces incorrect tar archives. Older versions of gtar did
> not report errors when unpacking, but newer versions do.

I've just looked at that broken archive - it is definitely badly stuffed.

More particularly the archive should end at the end of one of the 10k
data blocks.  However whatever produced the archive flushed its
output buffer again.  This means that the last 10k of the file
is identical to the last-but-one 10k.

This specific case of an invalid archive could be detected, and the
'valid header search' skipped [1].

Has enyone looked at any other of these 'broken' archives, to know
whether they always have 10k of junk padding?

	David

[1] is it right to unconditionlly perform this search, or should it depend
on a command line flag?

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk