tar (was: Re: Article on data rot on CD's)

No, though some implementations of tar do. tar does have issues with individual files over 8G, I think it is; if I'm reading this code right, the size field in the header is only 33 bits wide (11 octal digits). 100 characters. Some versions of tar (mine, GNU) use various extensions to effectively raise this limit; others break in various ways on pathnames that exceed it - or, in particularly bad implementations, approach it too closely. I would really like to find a spec for the tar format. Everyone waves hands and talks about this standard and that, but I've never actually managed to track down a spec. I don't know about a "site", but Elizabeth Zwicky, years ago, did a lovely little paper called _Torture-testing Backup and Archive Programs: Things You Ought to Know But Probably Would Rather Not_. According to the (paper) copy I have, it was presented at LISA V in 1991. While some of the programs listed have doubtless had new versions released in the more than a decade since then, others (such as SunOS tar) which many classiccmpers are likely to be using haven't. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B