Re: [Bug-tar] Year-2242 bug in GNU tar 1.15.1 (also, year-1969 bug)

[Paul Eggert]

Joerg Schilling <address@hidden> writes:

> Could you tell me where you believe to read that POSIX.1-1990 litits
> the time stamp to unsigned int?

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/pax.html

says "It is the ISO/IEC 646:1991 standard representation of the octal
value of the modification time" under the ustar format description.
Portable POSIX times cannot be negative, so this would seem to imply
pretty strongly that the value must be an unsigned octal value.

> Wouldn't it be possible that 33 bit two's complement may also meet
> the requirements?

Unlikely.  I would expect that to be spelled out, but it isn't.