The GNU format uses additional file types to describe new types of files in an archive. These are listed below.
GNUTYPE_DUMPDIR
'D'
|
This represents a directory and a list of files created by the
--incremental (-G) option. The |
GNUTYPE_MULTIVOL
'M'
|
This represents a file continued from another volume of a multi-volume
archive created with the --multi-volume (-M) option. The original
type of the file is not given here. The |
GNUTYPE_SPARSE
'S'
|
This flag indicates that we are dealing with a sparse file. Note that archiving a sparse file requires special operations to find holes in the file, which mark the positions of these holes, along with the number of bytes of data to be found after the hole. |
GNUTYPE_VOLHDR
'V'
|
This file type is used to mark the volume header that was given with
the --label=archive-label (-V archive-label) option when the archive was created. The |
You may have trouble reading a GNU format archive on a non-GNU
system if the options --incremental (-G), --multi-volume (-M),
--sparse (-S), or --label=archive-label (-V archive-label) were used when writing the archive.
In general, if tar does not use the GNU-added fields of the
header, other versions of tar should be able to read the
archive. Otherwise, the tar program will give an error, the
most likely one being a checksum error.