Quote:
Originally Posted by
bakunin
The AIX tar adheres to the USTAR standard, which in turn means: no single input file processed by tar can be larger than 8 GB, but the archive itself can be of (nearly) unlimited size. The reason for the limitation is the data structure of the USTAR header which can't hold size information of more than 8 GB.
I hope this helps.
bakunin
The pax utility (with the
-x pax option to set the archive format) provides extensions to the ustar archive format to remove the ustar format file size limits. When using the pax archive format, any size file can be saved in an archive as long as the archive created will fit into whatever device or filesystem is used to contain the archive.
Some implementations of cpio and tar (as well as the pax utility) are able to create and read pax format archives.