[Bug-tar] tar 1.14-1.15.1: large file corruptions using option -S

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

Hello,

This is a bug report for the latest tar, version 1.15.1.

Since December, users are regularly submit badly corrupted large, sparse
filesystem metadata image files archived by tar. By using recent tar
versions, the below corruptions are always reproducible if file sizes are
over 4 GB.

   % echo "hello" | dd of=x bs=1 seek=4G
   % ls -l x
   -rw-rw-r--  1 szaka szaka 4294967302 Mar  3 22:40 x
   % tar cSf x.tar x
   % ls -l x.tar
   -rw-rw-r--  1 szaka szaka      10240 Mar  3 22:40 x.tar
   % tar vtf x.tar
   -rw-rw-r-- szaka/szaka 4294967302 2005-03-03 22:40:07 x
   % tar xf x.tar   (same result by 'tar xSf x.tar')
   % ls -l x
   -rw-rw-r--  1 szaka szaka          6 Mar  3 22:40 x

Some quick tests on a few Linux systems revealed ...

   Red Hat 9       tar 1.13.25:  ok
   Debian 3.0      tar 1.13.25:  ok
   SystemRescueCD  tar 1.13.25:  broken (Gentoo based)
   Ubuntu 5.04-5   tar 1.14:     ok
   Mandrake 10.1   tar 1.14:     broken
   Knoppix 3.7     tar 1.14:     broken
   GNU official    tar 1.15.1:   broken

        Szaka