• Joe Tsai's avatar
    archive/tar: add support for long binary strings in GNU format · 5c20ffbb
    Joe Tsai authored
    The GNU tar format defines the following type flags:
    	TypeGNULongName = 'L' // Next file has a long name
    	TypeGNULongLink = 'K' // Next file symlinks to a file w/ a long name
    
    Anytime a string exceeds the field dedicated to store it, the GNU format
    permits a fake "file" to be prepended where that file entry has a Typeflag
    of 'L' or 'K' and the contents of the file is a NUL-terminated string.
    
    Contrary to previous TODO comments,
    the GNU format supports arbitrary strings (without NUL) rather UTF-8 strings.
    The manual says the following:
    <<<
    The name, linkname, magic, uname, and gname are
    null-terminated character strings
    > <<<
    > All characters in header blocks are represented
    > by using 8-bit characters in the local variant of ASCII.
    
    From this description, we gather the following:
    * We must forbid NULs in any GNU strings
    * Any 8-bit value (other than NUL) is permitted
    
    Since the modern world has moved to UTF-8, it is really difficult to
    determine what a "local variant of ASCII" means. For this reason,
    we treat strings as just an arbitrary binary string (without NUL)
    and leave it to the user to determine the encoding of this string.
    (Practically, it seems that UTF-8 is the typical encoding used
    in GNU archives seen in the wild).
    
    The implementation of GNU tar seems to confirm this interpretation
    of the manual where it permits any arbitrary binary string to exist
    within these fields so long as they do not contain the NUL character.
    
     $ touch `echo -e "not\x80\x81\x82\x83utf8"`
     $ gnutar -H gnu --tar -cvf gnu-not-utf8.tar $(echo -e "not\x80\x81\x82\x83utf8")
    
    The fact that we permit arbitrary binary in GNU strings goes
    hand-in-hand with the fact that GNU also permits a "base-256" encoding
    of numeric fields, which is effectively two-complement binary.
    
    Change-Id: Ic037ec6bed306d07d1312f0058594bd9b64d9880
    Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/55573Reviewed-by: 's avatarIan Lance Taylor <iant@golang.org>
    Run-TryBot: Joe Tsai <thebrokentoaster@gmail.com>
    TryBot-Result: Gobot Gobot <gobot@golang.org>
    5c20ffbb
tar_test.go 13 KB