Ciaran McCreesh writes: > You miss my point. GNU tar sometimes changes its on disk format (and > will be doing so again at some point for xattrs) It's not really important to the discussion, but... The TAR format is designed as such that on disk formats can be extended without breaking entirely backward compatibility. For what it's worth, extended attributes and ACLs are already supported by star (Schilling's) and bsdtar (libarchive). The fact that GNU tar doesn't support them at the moment is a different problem. On the other hand, even if the GNU tar does not support reading those attributes, it does handle them gracefully, warning the user of unknown extended headers, and then proceeding to unpack the data without preserving the extended attributes. So what Doug said stands perfectly and does not interest GNU tar at all. -- Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò http://blog.flameeyes.eu/