1.6 KiB
tar-no_std - Parse Tar Archives (Tarballs)
Due to historical reasons, there are several formats of tar archives. All of them are based on the same principles, but have some subtle differences that often make them incompatible with each other. [0]
Library to read Tar archives (by GNU Tar) in no_std contexts with zero allocations. If you have a standard
environment and need full feature support, I recommend the use of https://crates.io/crates/tar instead.
The crate is simple and only supports reading of "basic" archives, therefore no extensions, such
as GNU Longname. The maximum supported file name length is 100 characters including the NULL-byte.
The maximum supported file size is 8GiB. Also, directories are not supported yet but only flat
collections of files.
This library is useful, if you write a kernel or a similar low-level application, which needs "a bunch of files" from an archive ("init ramdisk"). The Tar file could for example come as a Multiboot2 boot module provided by the bootloader.
This crate focuses on extracting files from uncompressed Tar archives created with default options by GNU Tar. GNU Extensions such as sparse files, incremental archives, and long filename extension are not supported yet. This link gives a good overview over possible archive formats and their limitations.
Compression
If your tar file is compressed, e.g. bei gzip, you need to uncompress the bytes first (e.g. by a deflate algorithm),
before
MSRV
The MSRV is 1.51.0 stable.