[ACL-Devel] tar file format?

[Linda Walsh]

Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> 
> Michael Tokarev wrote:
> >
> > Does anybody knows how the acl entries should be represented
> > in tar?
> 
> The Posix 1003.1e working group did not issue any recommendations. To my best
> knowledge, there is an improved format being worked on (see the Austin group,
> <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/>). I don't know anything about the status or
> the area they will cover. There are also some other issues to be resolved,
> including maximum file size (there's a limit in tar that's reachable today, for
> example).
> 
> Who knows more about this?
> If you're serious about extending GNU tar you should talk to Paul Eggert
> <eggert@twinsun.com>, the mantainer of paxutils. Also, some people on this list
> might have some ideas about it.
---
	Under Irix there is a -M option that is supposed to store all the 
CAP, MAC and ACL information.  It dumps it to 1 specific file, say "/tmp/.foo".
So if you looked at the tar, you'd find a copy of /tmp/.foo for each file on the
tape.  When it is unpacked, tar should read the /tmp/.foo after it restores each
file and set the ATTR block up accordingly.  If you unpacked with a normal
version of tar that doesn't know about ATTR's, it would just write over /tmp/.foo
a bunch of times needlessly.  I suppose at the end of an archive an empty /tmp/.foo
should be written to zero out the last remaining ATTR block info.

-l

-- 
Linda A Walsh                    | Trust Technology, Core Linux, SGI
law@sgi.com                      | Voice: (650) 933-5338
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