tar files are not guaranteed to have any kind of "archive header". GNU tar has an optional "volume header", used to help identify the members and sequence of multi-volume¹ archives. Other versions of tar might not have this feature. Of course, if a tar file does have a volume header, its mtime would be the creation date of the archive, so one could stop reading the file once the volume header is read.

---

¹ "multi-volume" means the tar file may not be the complete archive. The archive may been created in size limited chunks. Use of this feature makes the individual tar files usefully extractable (as opposed to splitting a single tar file, which would require re-assmbly, first). Of course, a file that crosses volume boundries can only be partially extracted.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.