TAR - PAX Path Header
A 125-character path whose long component contains no slash at all, so the USTAR prefix field cannot store it. This archive uses a preceding 'x' extended header carrying a path= record in UTF-8. Its group siblings encode the same class of path with the other two mechanisms.
- README.txt
- a-deliberately-long-single-path-component-that-cannot-be-split-at-a-slash-because-it-contains-none-of-them-at-all.txt
Specifications
- Seed
- 20260807
- Tar Format
- PAX (POSIX.1-2001)
- Members
- 2
- Longest Path Chars
- 125
- Unsplittable
- the long component contains no '/' so USTAR's prefix field cannot help
- Mechanism
- a preceding 'x' extended header carrying a path= record in UTF-8
Testing contract
Expected to pass- Scenario
- List the archive and check both the reported member count and the long path.
- Expected result
- Exactly 2 members are reported - the preceding record is consumed as metadata, not listed as a file - and the long member's path is the full 125 characters.
What is a .tar file?
TAR (Tape Archive) is a Unix archive format that concatenates files with their metadata into a single uncompressed stream of fixed-size blocks. It preserves permissions, ownership, and directory structure but applies no compression itself. It is usually paired with a compressor such as gzip or xz.
How to use this file
Use an example TAR to test archive extraction, metadata and permission preservation, streaming block parsing, and pipelines that combine tar with external compression.
How to use this file for testing
“TAR - PAX Path Header” is a deterministic Novus Examples fixture for Conversion testing, Error handling. The same content exported across many formats and linked as a group, so you can convert one and diff against the expected twin.
Documented properties for this file: seed 20260807. Compare results against paired or grouped companions on this page when present (clean↔damaged, searchable↔scanned, or format twins) so scores stay reproducible across runs.
Download the file once, keep the path stable in CI or local scripts, and treat the spec table as the contract: dimensions, seeds, field lists, and roles are intentional. Corrupt or invalid samples are labelled as such — expect parsers to fail loudly rather than silently accept them.
Archive fixtures are documented down to their member list (shown on this page) and are deliberately safe — no zip bombs, executables, or hidden payloads. Test extractors against nested, unicode, empty, and encrypted variants.
Code examples
tar -tf pax-longpath.tar # list
tar -xf pax-longpath.tar -C out/ # extractRelated files
- arAR - Empty Archive (magic only)The smallest valid archive in this catalog: the 8-byte ar magic and nothing after it. ar has no trailer record, so end-of-file is the only end marker, and this is what an empty static library or an empty .deb control archive looks like on disk.
- cpioCPIO - Empty Archive (trailer only)An empty cpio archive is a single TRAILER!!! header record - a full 110-byte newc header with every numeric field zero - plus its alignment padding. Readers that look for member data before checking the name find none and must still report a valid, empty archive.
- tarTAR - Empty ArchiveAn empty tar is not a zero-byte file - it is exactly two 512-byte blocks of zeros, the end-of-archive marker with nothing in front of it. Writers that emit nothing at all produce a file most readers reject, which is the bug this 1024-byte file exists to distinguish.
- tarTAR - FIFO and Device Node RecordsA FIFO, a character device and a block device, each a header with no data blocks and with the device numbers in the devmajor/devminor fields. Unprivileged extraction cannot create the two device nodes, so the correct behaviour is to skip them with a warning rather than to abort the whole archive or to create empty regular files in their place.
- tarTAR - Large UID/GID (GNU base-256)The uid and gid fields hold 7 octal digits, so they top out at 2097151. This member is owned by uid 3000000, which needs GNU base-256 encoding: the field's high bit is set and the remaining bytes are a big-endian integer. Its group sibling encodes the same ownership the other way, so a reader can be checked against both without a second variable.
- tarTAR - Large UID/GID (PAX records)The uid and gid fields hold 7 octal digits, so they top out at 2097151. This member is owned by uid 3000000, which needs PAX uid=/gid= records in an 'x' extended header, with the classic field left at its maximum. Its group sibling encodes the same ownership the other way, so a reader can be checked against both without a second variable.
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