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.Dd March 18, 2012
.Dt LIBARCHIVE-FORMATS 5
.Os
.Sh NAME
.Nm libarchive-formats
.Nd archive formats supported by the libarchive library
.Sh DESCRIPTION
The
.Xr libarchive 3
library reads and writes a variety of streaming archive formats.
Generally speaking, all of these archive formats consist of a series of
.Dq entries .
Each entry stores a single file system object, such as a file, directory,
or symbolic link.
.Pp
The following provides a brief description of each format supported
by libarchive, with some information about recognized extensions or
limitations of the current library support.
Note that just because a format is supported by libarchive does not
imply that a program that uses libarchive will support that format.
Applications that use libarchive specify which formats they wish
to support, though many programs do use libarchive convenience
functions to enable all supported formats.
.Ss Tar Formats
The
.Xr libarchive 3
library can read most tar archives.
It can write POSIX-standard
.Dq ustar
and
.Dq pax interchange
formats as well as v7 tar format and a subset of the legacy GNU tar format.
.Pp
All tar formats store each entry in one or more 512-byte records.
The first record is used for file metadata, including filename,
timestamp, and mode information, and the file data is stored in
subsequent records.
Later variants have extended this by either appropriating undefined
areas of the header record, extending the header to multiple records,
or by storing special entries that modify the interpretation of
subsequent entries.
.Bl -tag -width indent
.It Cm gnutar
The
.Xr libarchive 3
library can read most GNU-format tar archives.
It currently supports the most popular GNU extensions, including
modern long filename and linkname support, as well as atime and ctime data.
The libarchive library does not support multi-volume
archives, nor the old GNU long filename format.
It can read GNU sparse file entries, including the new POSIX-based
formats.
.Pp
The
.Xr libarchive 3
library can write GNU tar format, including long filename
and linkname support, as well as atime and ctime data.
.It Cm pax
The
.Xr libarchive 3
library can read and write POSIX-compliant pax interchange format
archives.
Pax interchange format archives are an extension of the older ustar
format that adds a separate entry with additional attributes stored
as key/value pairs immediately before each regular entry.
The presence of these additional entries is the only difference between
pax interchange format and the older ustar format.
The extended attributes are of unlimited length and are stored
as UTF-8 Unicode strings.
Keywords defined in the standard are in all lowercase; vendors are allowed
to define custom keys by preceding them with the vendor name in all uppercase.
When writing pax archives, libarchive uses many of the SCHILY keys
defined by Joerg Schilling's
.Dq star
archiver and a few LIBARCHIVE keys.
The libarchive library can read most of the SCHILY keys
and most of the GNU keys introduced by GNU tar.
It silently ignores any keywords that it does not understand.
.Pp
The pax interchange format converts filenames to Unicode
and stores them using the UTF-8 encoding.
Prior to libarchive 3.0, libarchive erroneously assumed
that the system wide-character routines natively supported
Unicode.
This caused it to mis-handle non-ASCII filenames on systems
that did not satisfy this assumption.
.It Cm restricted pax
The libarchive library can also write pax archives in which it
attempts to suppress the extended attributes entry whenever
possible.
The result will be identical to a ustar archive unless the
extended attributes entry is required to store a long file
name, long linkname, extended ACL, file flags, or if any of the standard
ustar data (user name, group name, UID, GID, etc) cannot be fully
represented in the ustar header.
In all cases, the result can be dearchived by any program that
can read POSIX-compliant pax interchange format archives.
Programs that correctly read ustar format (see below) will also be
able to read this format; any extended attributes will be extracted as
separate files stored in
.Pa PaxHeader
directories.
.It Cm ustar
The libarchive library can both read and write this format.
This format has the following limitations:
.Bl -bullet -compact
.It
Device major and minor numbers are limited to 21 bits.
Nodes with larger numbers will not be added to the archive.
.It
Path names in the archive are limited to 255 bytes.
(Shorter if there is no / character in exactly the right place.)
.It
Symbolic links and hard links are stored in the archive with
the name of the referenced file.
This name is limited to 100 bytes.
.It
Extended attributes, file flags, and other extended
security information cannot be stored.
.It
Archive entries are limited to 8 gigabytes in size.
.El
Note that the pax interchange format has none of these restrictions.
The ustar format is old and widely supported.
It is recommended when compatibility is the primary concern.
.It Cm v7
The libarchive library can read and write the legacy v7 tar format.
This format has the following limitations:
.Bl -bullet -compact
.It
Only regular files, directories, and symbolic links can be archived.
Block and character device nodes, FIFOs, and sockets cannot be archived.
.It
Path names in the archive are limited to 100 bytes.
.It
Symbolic links and hard links are stored in the archive with
the name of the referenced file.
This name is limited to 100 bytes.
.It
User and group information are stored as numeric IDs; there
is no provision for storing user or group names.
.It
Extended attributes, file flags, and other extended
security information cannot be stored.
.It
Archive entries are limited to 8 gigabytes in size.
.El
Generally, users should prefer the ustar format for portability
as the v7 tar format is both less useful and less portable.
.El
.Pp
The libarchive library also reads a variety of commonly-used extensions to
the basic tar format.
These extensions are recognized automatically whenever they appear.
.Bl -tag -width indent
.It Numeric extensions.
The POSIX standards require fixed-length numeric fields to be written with
some character position reserved for terminators.
Libarchive allows these fields to be written without terminator characters.
This extends the allowable range; in particular, ustar archives with this
extension can support entries up to 64 gigabytes in size.
Libarchive also recognizes base-256 values in most numeric fields.
This essentially removes all limitations on file size, modification time,
and device numbers.
.It Solaris extensions
Libarchive recognizes ACL and extended attribute records written
by Solaris tar.
Currently, libarchive only has support for old-style ACLs; the
newer NFSv4 ACLs are recognized but discarded.
.El
.Pp
The first tar program appeared in Seventh Edition Unix in 1979.
The first official standard for the tar file format was the
.Dq ustar
(Unix Standard Tar) format defined by POSIX in 1988.
POSIX.1-2001 extended the ustar format to create the
.Dq pax interchange
format.
.Ss Cpio Formats
The libarchive library can read a number of common cpio variants and can write
.Dq odc
and
.Dq newc
format archives.
A cpio archive stores each entry as a fixed-size header followed
by a variable-length filename and variable-length data.
Unlike the tar format, the cpio format does only minimal padding
of the header or file data.
There are several cpio variants, which differ primarily in
how they store the initial header: some store the values as
octal or hexadecimal numbers in ASCII, others as binary values of
varying byte order and length.
.Bl -tag -width indent
.It Cm binary
The libarchive library transparently reads both big-endian and little-endian
variants of the original binary cpio format.
This format used 32-bit binary values for file size and mtime,
and 16-bit binary values for the other fields.
.It Cm odc
The libarchive library can both read and write this
POSIX-standard format, which is officially known as the
.Dq cpio interchange format
or the
.Dq octet-oriented cpio archive format
and sometimes unofficially referred to as the
.Dq old character format .
This format stores the header contents as octal values in ASCII.
It is standard, portable, and immune from byte-order confusion.
File sizes and mtime are limited to 33 bits (8GB file size),
other fields are limited to 18 bits.
.It Cm SVR4/newc
The libarchive library can read both CRC and non-CRC variants of
this format.
The SVR4 format uses eight-digit hexadecimal values for
all header fields.
This limits file size to 4GB, and also limits the mtime and
other fields to 32 bits.
The SVR4 format can optionally include a CRC of the file
contents, although libarchive does not currently verify this CRC.
.El
.Pp
Cpio first appeared in PWB/UNIX 1.0, which was released within
AT&T in 1977.
PWB/UNIX 1.0 formed the basis of System III Unix, released outside
of AT&T in 1981.
This makes cpio older than tar, although cpio was not included
in Version 7 AT&T Unix.
As a result, the tar command became much better known in universities
and research groups that used Version 7.
The combination of the
.Nm find
and
.Nm cpio
utilities provided very precise control over file selection.
Unfortunately, the format has many limitations that make it unsuitable
for widespread use.
Only the POSIX format permits files over 4GB, and its 18-bit
limit for most other fields makes it unsuitable for modern systems.
In addition, cpio formats only store numeric UID/GID values (not
usernames and group names), which can make it very difficult to correctly
transfer archives across systems with dissimilar user numbering.
.Ss Shar Formats
A
.Dq shell archive
is a shell script that, when executed on a POSIX-compliant
system, will recreate a collection of file system objects.
The libarchive library can write two different kinds of shar archives:
.Bl -tag -width indent
.It Cm shar
The traditional shar format uses a limited set of POSIX
commands, including
.Xr echo 1 ,
.Xr mkdir 1 ,
and
.Xr sed 1 .
It is suitable for portably archiving small collections of plain text files.
However, it is not generally well-suited for large archives
(many implementations of
.Xr sh 1
have limits on the size of a script) nor should it be used with non-text files.
.It Cm shardump
This format is similar to shar but encodes files using
.Xr uuencode 1
so that the result will be a plain text file regardless of the file contents.
It also includes additional shell commands that attempt to reproduce as
many file attributes as possible, including owner, mode, and flags.
The additional commands used to restore file attributes make
shardump archives less portable than plain shar archives.
.El
.Ss ISO9660 format
Libarchive can read and extract from files containing ISO9660-compliant
CDROM images.
In many cases, this can remove the need to burn a physical CDROM
just in order to read the files contained in an ISO9660 image.
It also avoids security and complexity issues that come with
virtual mounts and loopback devices.
Libarchive supports the most common Rockridge extensions and has partial
support for Joliet extensions.
If both extensions are present, the Joliet extensions will be
used and the Rockridge extensions will be ignored.
In particular, this can create problems with hardlinks and symlinks,
which are supported by Rockridge but not by Joliet.
.Pp
Libarchive reads ISO9660 images using a streaming strategy.
This allows it to read compressed images directly
(decompressing on the fly) and allows it to read images
directly from network sockets, pipes, and other non-seekable
data sources.
This strategy works well for optimized ISO9660 images created
by many popular programs.
Such programs collect all directory information at the beginning
of the ISO9660 image so it can be read from a physical disk
with a minimum of seeking.
However, not all ISO9660 images can be read in this fashion.
.Pp
Libarchive can also write ISO9660 images.
Such images are fully optimized with the directory information
preceding all file data.
This is done by storing all file data to a temporary file
while collecting directory information in memory.
When the image is finished, libarchive writes out the
directory structure followed by the file data.
The location used for the temporary file can be changed
by the usual environment variables.
.Ss Zip format
Libarchive can read and write zip format archives that have
uncompressed entries and entries compressed with the
.Dq deflate
algorithm.
Other zip compression algorithms are not supported.
It can extract jar archives, archives that use Zip64 extensions and
self-extracting zip archives.
Libarchive can use either of two different strategies for
reading Zip archives:
a streaming strategy which is fast and can handle extremely
large archives, and a seeking strategy which can correctly
process self-extracting Zip archives and archives with
deleted members or other in-place modifications.
.Pp
The streaming reader processes Zip archives as they are read.
It can read archives of arbitrary size from tape or
network sockets, and can decode Zip archives that have
been separately compressed or encoded.
However, self-extracting Zip archives and archives with
certain types of modifications cannot be correctly
handled.
Such archives require that the reader first process the
Central Directory, which is ordinarily located
at the end of a Zip archive and is thus inaccessible
to the streaming reader.
If the program using libarchive has enabled seek support, then
libarchive will use this to processes the central directory first.
.Pp
In particular, the seeking reader must be used to
correctly handle self-extracting archives.
Such archives consist of a program followed by a regular
Zip archive.
The streaming reader cannot parse the initial program
portion, but the seeking reader starts by reading the
Central Directory from the end of the archive.
Similarly, Zip archives that have been modified in-place
can have deleted entries or other garbage data that
can only be accurately detected by first reading the
Central Directory.
.Ss Archive (library) file format
The Unix archive format (commonly created by the
.Xr ar 1
archiver) is a general-purpose format which is
used almost exclusively for object files to be
read by the link editor
.Xr ld 1 .
The ar format has never been standardised.
There are two common variants:
the GNU format derived from SVR4,
and the BSD format, which first appeared in 4.4BSD.
The two differ primarily in their handling of filenames
longer than 15 characters:
the GNU/SVR4 variant writes a filename table at the beginning of the archive;
the BSD format stores each long filename in an extension
area adjacent to the entry.
Libarchive can read both extensions,
including archives that may include both types of long filenames.
Programs using libarchive can write GNU/SVR4 format
if they provide an entry called
.Pa //
containing a filename table to be written into the archive
before any of the entries.
Any entries whose names are not in the filename table
will be written using BSD-style long filenames.
This can cause problems for programs such as
GNU ld that do not support the BSD-style long filenames.
.Ss mtree
Libarchive can read and write files in
.Xr mtree 5
format.
This format is not a true archive format, but rather a textual description
of a file hierarchy in which each line specifies the name of a file and
provides specific metadata about that file.
Libarchive can read all of the keywords supported by both
the NetBSD and FreeBSD versions of
.Xr mtree 8 ,
although many of the keywords cannot currently be stored in an
.Tn archive_entry
object.
When writing, libarchive supports use of the
.Xr archive_write_set_options 3
interface to specify which keywords should be included in the
output.
If libarchive was compiled with access to suitable
cryptographic libraries (such as the OpenSSL libraries),
it can compute hash entries such as
.Cm sha512
or
.Cm md5
from file data being written to the mtree writer.
.Pp
When reading an mtree file, libarchive will locate the corresponding
files on disk using the
.Cm contents
keyword if present or the regular filename.
If it can locate and open the file on disk, it will use that
to fill in any metadata that is missing from the mtree file
and will read the file contents and return those to the program
using libarchive.
If it cannot locate and open the file on disk, libarchive
will return an error for any attempt to read the entry
body.
.Ss 7-Zip
Libarchive can read and write 7-Zip format archives.
TODO: Need more information
.Ss CAB
Libarchive can read Microsoft Cabinet (
.Dq CAB )
format archives.
TODO: Need more information.
.Ss LHA
TODO: Information about libarchive's LHA support
.Ss RAR
Libarchive has limited support for reading RAR format archives.
Currently, libarchive can read RARv3 format archives
which have been either created uncompressed, or compressed using
any of the compression methods supported by the RARv3 format.
Libarchive can also read self-extracting RAR archives.
.Ss Warc
Libarchive can read and write
.Dq web archives .
TODO: Need more information
.Ss XAR
Libarchive can read and write the XAR format used by many Apple tools.
TODO: Need more information
.Sh SEE ALSO
.Xr ar 1 ,
.Xr cpio 1 ,
.Xr mkisofs 1 ,
.Xr shar 1 ,
.Xr tar 1 ,
.Xr zip 1 ,
.Xr zlib 3 ,
.Xr cpio 5 ,
.Xr mtree 5 ,
.Xr tar 5