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It does make one wonder whether Illumos pax or pax from one of the other BSDs would have worked better; or whether it was the tool generating the test pax archive in the first place that was the problem.

I wrote a tar parser long ago while playing at parsing various formats and filesystems.

The only thing I really remember about the format is the thing stores sizes formatted as octal in ascii strings.

(2018)

We know it's out of date because "This is signalled by setting the MSB of the first octet, and provides for 95-bit integer size, i.e. 32768 YiB (it's so big that we lack a better prefix for it)." ;)

In 2022 ronna- became the recognized prefix for 10^27 and earlier this year robi- became the recognized prefix for 2^90. 32768 YiB is 32RiB.

Jupiter has a mass of 1.9 Rkg.

After that is quetta- for 10^30 and quebi- for 2^100.

The Sun has a mass of 2 Qkg.

Qkg? I hope that's not a thing and that you either mean 2Qg or 2000Qg?

D'oh! Yes, you're absolutely without a doubt correct!

The Sun masses 2000Qg. We're going to need a new unit.

Portability of Tar Features