On 31 Oct 2001, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

: >  > The mtree-like specfiles use names, and pax uses names, so we don't
: >  > actually do UID lookups for that purpose. The one problem is that
: >  > makefs needs the ability to point at a password file to pick the uids
: >  > for the file system it creates.
: >
: > Right, but the tar files themselves have numbers, right?
:
: ustar now includes "uname" and "gname" fields which are 32 byte
: character arrays.

However, it still does have numeric fields which can be used by the tar
program used at extraction time.

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