[Bug-tar] Re: HP-UX tar -> GNU tar: Archive value -56720837941 is out of uid_t range 0..4294967295

[Paul Eggert]

Thanks for the followup.  Apparently HP-UX tar represents pniemima's
numeric UID using the string "-000001".  GNU tar decodes this as if it
were Base 64 (Internet RFC 2045 Table 1), but this clearly isn't right
for HP-UX.

What is pniemima's actual numeric UID?  Is it less than 2**24 (i.e.,
16777216)?  If so, it's a bug in HP-UX tar.  If not, then perhaps
HP-UX tar represents out-of-range numeric values using the string
"-000001".

The GNU tar Base-64 code supports a long-obsolescent test version of
GNU tar, so perhaps it should be ripped out.  But I'd like to know how
HP-UX tar behaves first, so that we can be compatible.

If you extract that archive using HP-UX tar as "root", on a host that
does not have the user "pniemima", what ownership does HP-UX tar
assign to the extracted files?