Skip to content
Novus Examples
tar10 KB

TAR - 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.

Archive contents — 2 entriestar
  • README.txt
  • owned.txt

Specifications

Seed
20260807
Tar Format
GNU tar
Members
2
Uid
3000000
Gid
3000001
Octal Field Capacity
2097151
Mechanism
GNU base-256 encoding: the field's high bit is set and the remaining bytes are a big-endian integer

Testing contract

Expected to pass
Scenario
List the archive with numeric owner IDs shown and compare against the group sibling.
Expected result
ids/owned.txt reports uid 3000000 and gid 3000001 exactly, matching the sibling archive; a reader that parses the classic octal field alone reports 2097151 or fails.

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 - Large UID/GID (GNU base-256)” is a deterministic Novus Examples fixture for Conversion testing, Metadata 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 large-ids-gnu.tar       # list
tar -xf large-ids-gnu.tar -C out/  # extract

Generated by generation/archives_p7.py. Free for any use, no attribution required — license.