usr/share/man/cat5/tarformat.0



TAR(5)                        1985                         TAR(5)


N\bNA\bAM\bME\bE
     tar - tape archive file format

D\bDE\bES\bSC\bCR\bRI\bIP\bPT\bTI\bIO\bON\bN
     _\bT_\ba_\br, (the tape archive command) dumps several files into
     one, in a medium suitable for transportation.

     A ``tar tape'' or file is a series of blocks.  Each block is
     of size TBLOCK.  A file on the tape is represented by a
     header block which describes the file, followed by zero or
     more blocks which give the contents of the file.  At the end
     of the tape are two blocks filled with binary zeros, as an
     end-of-file indicator.

     The blocks are grouped for physical I/O operations.  Each
     group of _\bn blocks (where _\bn is set by the b\bb keyletter on the
     _\bt_\ba_\br(1) command line - default is 20 blocks) is written with
     a single system call; on nine-track tapes, the result of
     this write is a single tape record.  The last group is
     always written at the full size, so blocks after the two
     zero blocks contain random data.  On reading, the specified
     or default group size is used for the first read, but if
     that read returns less than a full tape block, the reduced
     block size is used for further reads.

     The header block looks like:

          #define TBLOCK 512
          #define NAMSIZ 100

          union hblock {
               char dummy[TBLOCK];
               struct header {
                    char name[NAMSIZ];
                    char mode[8];
                    char uid[8];
                    char gid[8];
                    char size[12];
                    char mtime[12];
                    char chksum[8];
                    char linkflag;
                    char linkname[NAMSIZ];
               } dbuf;
          };

     _\bN_\ba_\bm_\be is a null-terminated string.  The other fields are
     zero-filled octal numbers in ASCII.  Each field (of width w)
     contains w-2 digits, a space, and a null, except _\bs_\bi_\bz_\be and
     _\bm_\bt_\bi_\bm_\be, which do not contain the trailing null and _\bc_\bh_\bk_\bs_\bu_\bm
     which has a null followed by a space.  _\bN_\ba_\bm_\be is the name of
     the file, as specified on the _\bt_\ba_\br command line.  Files
     dumped because they were in a directory which was named in


Printed 7/27/90             November                            1


TAR(5)                        1985                         TAR(5)


     the command line have the directory name as prefix and
     /_\bf_\bi_\bl_\be_\bn_\ba_\bm_\be as suffix.  _\bM_\bo_\bd_\be is the file mode, with the top
     bit masked off.  _\bU_\bi_\bd and _\bg_\bi_\bd are the user and group numbers
     which own the file.  _\bS_\bi_\bz_\be is the size of the file in bytes.
     Links and symbolic links are dumped with this field speci-
     fied as zero.  _\bM_\bt_\bi_\bm_\be is the modification time of the file at
     the time it was dumped.  _\bC_\bh_\bk_\bs_\bu_\bm is an octal ASCII value
     which represents the sum of all the bytes in the header
     block.  When calculating the checksum, the _\bc_\bh_\bk_\bs_\bu_\bm field is
     treated as if it were all blanks.  _\bL_\bi_\bn_\bk_\bf_\bl_\ba_\bg is NULL if the
     file is ``normal'' or a special file, ASCII `1' if it is an
     hard link, and ASCII `2' if it is a symbolic link.  The name
     linked-to, if any, is in _\bl_\bi_\bn_\bk_\bn_\ba_\bm_\be, with a trailing null.
     Unused fields of the header are binary zeros (and are
     included in the checksum).

     The first time a given i-node number is dumped, it is dumped
     as a regular file.  The second and subsequent times, it is
     dumped as a link instead.  Upon retrieval, if a link entry
     is retrieved, but not the file it was linked to, an error
     message is printed and the tape must be manually re-scanned
     to retrieve the linked-to file.

     The encoding of the header is designed to be portable across
     machines.

S\bSE\bEE\bE A\bAL\bLS\bSO\bO
     tar(1)

B\bBU\bUG\bGS\bS
     Names or linknames longer than NAMSIZ produce error reports
     and cannot be dumped.


Printed 7/27/90             November                            2