Each subdirectory contains an archive file which highlights how tar implementations differ in their way of interpreting specific conditions in tar formats.

The goal is to show why specific paradigms should not be used for best portability and how to avoid undefined behavior in regard to POSIX 2017.

Run check.sh as regular user to inspect your tar implementation with all gathered samples. The script output is JSON formatted and contains results for each sample. If your tar implementation interprets the archive file correctly, then the value starts with a 0. If the value starts with a 1, then your implementation possibly misbehaves or another condition leads to test case errors.

Subdirectory names start with the format they implement, e.g. ustar. The suffix is simply an incremented index number based on time of addition to this collection.

The ustar format is specified by POSIX 2017. It is the preferred format for samples. Test cases use other formats only if they are required.

Numbers in fields shall have leading zeros and terminating nul or space characters. Some other tar formats allow leading spaces. Test how an implementation reacts to space formatted numbers, numbers missing terminating nul or space characters, and illegal number fields.

Strict implementations should discard contained header, but discarding the header might lead to a bad user experience. This conflict already explains why this test case easily leads to different results.

Conclusion: Number fields must start with a number and terminate.

If a read-only directory contains files, then tar implementations have to keep this in mind. The mode can only be set after all contained files and directories have been created. Some implementations fail to extract such archives.

Conclusion: Read-only directories reduce portability.

A regular file entry without a name would lead to a file with an illegal file name. POSIX 2017 states that the processing of such entries is implementation-defined. Two consecutive empty name entries can be misinterpreted as two consecutive empty blocks (end of archive) by implementations.

Conclusion: Entries must have names with portable characters.

Directory traversing links can lead to security issues, e.g. extracting entries which have such links in their parent path. Some implementations replace such symbolic links temporarily with files and set actual links after extraction. If such a temporary file is replaced with an actual file during extraction, then the actual file should remain.

Conclusion: Multiple entries with same path reduce portability.

Directories in v7 tar archives must end with a slash. Also they may have a size but do not have attached data blocks. This crafted archive contains two versions of a file. Which version is extracted depends on correctness of the tar implementation.

Conclusion: Directories with a size reduce portability.