[Bug-tar] Interchange issue with archive containing sparse file

[markk]

Hi,

There seems to be an interchange problem between star and GNU tar,
possibly related to sparse file support. Or perhaps this is just a bug in
GNU tar?

I'm using star 1.5 and the problem happened with both GNU tar 1.22 (my
Linux distribution's provided version) and 1.25 which I compiled from
source.

I created an archive using star:
  $ star -no-fifo -v -c f=archive.tar artype=xustar -numeric -sparse filename

The archive created by star was a multiple of 10KB in size; 3,666,155,520
bytes. Both star and GNU tar extract the file from archive.tar correctly.
However, after extraction GNU tar reports:
  tar: Unexpected EOF in archive
  tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

That was for a single file. When the archive created using star contains
files after the sparse file, on attempting extraction GNU tar extracts the
first sparse file only, and gives the above message. The following files
are not extracted.