Newer version of tar?

imahdi · 01-04-2005, 08:16 PM

Someone handed me a DDS4 tape that I'm trying to get into. I know that there's a 14GB tar file on there but tar on RH9 won't handle extended headers and it conks out without even giving me a file size when I try to list the tape contents.

I tried using star and that got me closer. It *did* conk out, but after extracting 2 GB of the tar file. Close, but no cigar. According to what I've read about star, it seems that if the file was created using tar originally, it's still bound to the tar limitations of 2GB (no extended headers).

It was created on Solaris using tar with the '-E' flag to allow for the large file size, but I'd like to handle it in RedHat.

Is there a newer version of tar or some trick I don't know about to let me extract a file this large?

Thanks,
Isaak

leonscape · 01-04-2005, 08:26 PM

Current version of tar ( presuming GNU tar ) is 1.14 since July 2004, and it doesn't have a size limit.

Below is a table of formats that GNU tar supports, and their limitations.

Code:

 Format  UID            File Size      Path 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

So perhaps it is an old version of tar?