For compliance tests with POSIX.1-1990 you need to test the output of 
your favorite TAR implementation and you need to test whether the TAR 
implementation does work as expected if it encounters tar archives that 
approach limits of the POAIS.1-1990 TAR specification.

A recent version of the files is always on:

	ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/star/testscripts/

Here comes a quick test that checks most important issues for archive exchange:

1) Test for compliance with files that are a bit bigger than usual:

	Note that the test tar archives used for this conformance test are 
	bzip2 compressed. This has been done because it is the only widely 
	available compression format that allows to compress several gigabytes of 
	nulls into a few bytes.

	*** File Read tests 2 Gigabytes - 1 Byte

	The file 'ustar-big-2g.tar.bz2' contains a file with the largest size 
	that a historic tar implementation is able to understand.

	star tvf ustar-big-2g.tar.bz2 
	star: WARNING: Archive is bzip2 compressed, trying to use the -bz option.
	2147483647 -rw-------  jes/glone Jun 15 16:53 2002 big
	         0 -rw-r--r--  jes/glone Jun 15 16:53 2002 file
	star: 209715 blocks + 4096 bytes (total of 2147485696 bytes = 2097154.00k).

	Any tar implementation should work correctly with this archive and 
	needs to list _both_ files without any error message if you call:

	bzip2 -d < ustar-big-2g.tar.bz2 | your_tar tvf -

	If any error message is printed or the second file is missing on your 
	list, then your TAR implementation under test is broken.

	*** File Read tests 8 Gigabytes - 1 Byte

	The file 'ustar-big-8g.tar.bz2' contains a file with the largest size 
	that may be used with the ustar (POSIX.1-1990 tar) format.

	star tvf ustar-big-8g.tar.bz2 
	star: WARNING: Archive is bzip2 compressed, trying to use the -bz option.
	8589934591 -rw-------  jes/glone Jun 15 17:08 2002 8gb-1
	         0 -rw-r--r--  jes/glone Jun 15 16:53 2002 file
	star: 838861 blocks + 0 bytes (total of 8589936640 bytes = 8388610.00k).

	On non-large file aware platforms (such as AIX) this may fail.
	But Linux-2.4 is large file aware. On a large file aware platform,
	any tar implementation should work correctly with this archive and 
	needs to list _both_ files without any error message if you call:

	bzip2 -d < ustar-big-8g.tar.bz2 | your_tar tvf -

	If any error message is printed or the second file is missing on your 
	list, then your TAR implementation under test is broken.


2) Test if your TAR implementation did unpack the archive correctly by using
   star to diff against the archive. Run:

	star -diff -v diffopts=!atime,ctime < /tmp/ustar-all-quicktest.tar

   Make sure you use star-1.5a04 or later to do the diff.


3) Testing whether your TAR implementation supports all file types and long file 
   names correctly.
	
	The archive "ustar-all-quicktest.tar" contains:

	-	A first part that contains correct and simple versions of all
		supported file types: plain file, hard link, sym link, cdev,
		bdev. directory, contiguous file.

	-	The second part contains a file with one character that has the 
		8th bit set in the file name. If your TAR implementation does
		not compute checksums correctly, it will fail here.

	-	The third part contains a file and a hard link which use
		exactly 100 characters in the filename/linkname.

	-	A fourth part that contains a file name that is 256 characters 
		long. 155 characters are in the POSIX filename prefix and 100 
		characters are in the POSIX filename suffix.
		This part also contains a file with a file name of 256 
		characters and a link name of 100 characters.

	-	The fifth part contains a file with 256 characters in the name
		but the usually unused field directly after the filename prefix 
		contains junk characters. If the TAR under test does not handle 
		file name prefix lengths of 155 chars correctly, the file name
		that is extracted will contain the sequence "/abcde.hihi/" 
		instead of just "/abcde/"

	-	The sixth part contains a character special, a block special, a 
		directory and a named pipe that have the "size" field != 0.
		A TAR implementation that does not handle the "size" field as 
		indicated by the POSIX standard will fail here.

	-	The last part contains a file called END to indicate that 
		everything went OK and that the last file in the archive is 
		handled correctly.

	NOTE: as some tar implementions seem to have problems with extracting
	contiguous files, I also made a tar archive called:

		ustar-all-quicktest.tar-without-cont-file


	Performing the test for the things described above:

	1)	Create an empty directory and do a "chdir" into that directory.
		Copy the test archive ustar-all-quicktest.tar into the directory 
		/tmp, copy the file quicktest.filelist into the /tmp directory 
		too. 

	2)	Become root and call:

			your_tar xf /tmp/ustar-all-quicktest.tar

		If your TAR allows to handle different archive types do _not_
		tell your tar that this is a "ustar" archive. Let it find this 
		itself.

	3)	Create a new archive using your TAR implementation:

		your_tar cf /tmp/new.tar ` cat /tmp/quicktest.filelist `

		If you TAR implementation allows to handle different archive 
		types add an option to force "ustar" archive creation. For 
		"star" this is -Hustar, for "GNU tar" this is --posix.

		*** IMPORTANT:	a POSIX.1-1990 compliant Tar implementation 
				needs to be able to archive all files without 
				using any vendor specific extensions.

	4)	Run tartest to check the archives for POSIX.1-1990 compliance.
		The working version of the "tartest" program is part of 
		star-1.5a04 or later.

		tartest -v < /tmp/ustar-all-quicktest.tar	> /tmp/old.out
		tartest -v < /tmp/new.tar			> /tmp/new.out

	5)	Check the output file /tmp/new.out for POSIX.1-1990 
		noncompliances. If you did not find any wrning, them run
		"diff /tmp/old.out /tmp/new.out" to check if no file name has 
		been changed due to a bug in your TAR program under test.

	The output of the "tartest -v" run on the original test archive
	may be found (for reference purposes)  in the file 
	'tartest-quicktest.out'. 
