[Help-tar] Re: Tar same data - different archive

[Sergey Naumov]

It seems that I solved this issue by inspecting source code.
That was because mentioned number was checksum of tar header and there
was difference in uname and gname fields of tar header. For example,
if at one host sshd is installed, and not installed at another, so
there is group "sshd" only at one of them, and name of this group is
added to tar header only at one host.
Flag --numeric-owner solves this problem, but it is weird for me why
such a behavior enabled by default.

2010/8/27 Sergey Naumov <address@hidden>:
> Hello.
>
> My problem is that archival of the same data (files on Compact Flash
> partition) results in different archives on different hosts, so I cant
> pass a check of md5sum for these archives. Both hosts has Debian 5.0.0
> OS with GNU tar 1.20.
>
> Almost all bytes in these archives are identical except some magic
> numbers (only two of them) made (as I understand) by tar.
>
> These magic sections looks like
> 0002755 0000000 0000152 00000245370 11317210320 014142  0
> and problems occured with 6-th number (014142 in this case).
>
> Could you explain what these numbers means and how to overcome this problem?
>
> Concrete different sections and the whole diff file are attached.
>
> Thanks in advance, Sergey Naumov.
>