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8 Controlling the Archive Format

Due to historical reasons, there are several formats of tar archives. All of them are based on the same principles, but have some subtle differences that often make them incompatible with each other.

GNU tar is able to create and handle archives in a variety of formats. The most frequently used formats are (in alphabetical order):

gnu
Format used by GNU tar versions up to 1.13.25. This format derived from an early POSIX standard, adding some improvements such as sparse file handling and incremental archives. Unfortunately these features were implemented in a way incompatible with other archive formats.

Archives in ‘gnu’ format are able to hold pathnames of unlimited length.

oldgnu
Format used by GNU tar of versions prior to 1.12.
v7
Archive format, compatible with the V7 implementation of tar. This format imposes a number of limitations. The most important of them are:
  1. The maximum length of a file name is limited to 99 characters.
  2. The maximum length of a symbolic link is limited to 99 characters.
  3. It is impossible to store special files (block and character devices, fifos etc.)
  4. Maximum value of user or group ID is limited to 2097151 (7777777 octal)
  5. V7 archives do not contain symbolic ownership information (user and group name of the file owner).

This format has traditionally been used by Automake when producing Makefiles. This practice will change in the future, in the meantime, however this means that projects containing filenames more than 99 characters long will not be able to use GNU tar 1.15.92 and Automake prior to 1.9.

ustar
Archive format defined by POSIX.1-1988 specification. It stores symbolic ownership information. It is also able to store special files. However, it imposes several restrictions as well:
  1. The maximum length of a file name is limited to 256 characters, provided that the filename can be split at directory separator in two parts, first of them being at most 155 bytes long. So, in most cases the maximum file name length will be shorter than 256 characters.
  2. The maximum length of a symbolic link name is limited to 100 characters.
  3. Maximum size of a file the archive is able to accomodate is 8GB
  4. Maximum value of UID/GID is 2097151.
  5. Maximum number of bits in device major and minor numbers is 21.

star
Format used by Jörg Schilling star implementation. GNU tar is able to read ‘star’ archives but currently does not produce them.
posix
Archive format defined by POSIX.1-2001 specification. This is the most flexible and feature-rich format. It does not impose any restrictions on file sizes or filename lengths. This format is quite recent, so not all tar implementations are able to handle it properly. However, this format is designed in such a way that any tar implementation able to read ‘ustar’ archives will be able to read most ‘posix’ archives as well, with the only exception that any additional information (such as long file names etc.) will in such case be extracted as plain text files along with the files it refers to.

This archive format will be the default format for future versions of GNU tar.

The following table summarizes the limitations of each of these formats:

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

The default format for GNU tar is defined at compilation time. You may check it by running tar --help, and examining the last lines of its output. Usually, GNU tar is configured to create archives in ‘gnu’ format, however, future version will switch to ‘posix’.