A pure bash library for generating uncompressed tarball chunks.

This implementation is fully self-contained and does not rely on any external programs.

Tested with GNU Bash 5.1, 4.4 and 4.3, striving for full support from 4.3+.

USAGE: ustar-dump [-hBCDFHLP] [-o OPTION] [--] PATH [PAYLOAD]

  -h         Display this text and exit.
  -B         Set to block device,     alias for `-o type=blk,mode=0666`.
  -C         Set to character device, alias for `-o type=chr,mode=0666`.
  -D         Set to directory,        alias for `-o type=dir,mode=0775`.
  -F         Set to regular file,     alias for `-o type=reg,mode=0644`.
  -H         Set to hard link,        alias for `-o type=lnk,mode=0644`.
  -L         Set to symbolic link,    alias for `-o type=sym,mode=0777`.
  -P         Set to named pipe,       alias for `-o type=fifo,mode=0644`.
  -o OPTION  Configure fields of header.

Use the -o OPTION to change specific fields of a header. The OPTION argument is defined as follows:

OPTION := FIELD[+FIELD..]=[VALUE][,OPTION..]

The assignment of VALUE can either be a string or numeric constant. The latter supports integers with different base notations like 0x400, 0755. If a field is not defined it either defaults to the empty string "" or 0 for strings or numbers respectively. Please take note, that an assignment is terminated by , (comma) or \n (newline). Literals like , or \n should be escaped properly, e.g. lorem ispum\, dolor.

It is also possible to specify multiple fields by concatenating them by +, e.g. user+group, thus the value is applied to all fields enumerated.

Multiple options can be specified either by concatenation , (comma), or by specifying multiple -o options at command line. Its values are applied in order appearance.

There is also a special variable USTAR_OPTIONS whose content is applied before command line arguments are evaluated. Please take a look at the Examples section for how it can be used.

Where FIELD can be one of:

The fields prefix and name are used to specify the file name of the chunk. A prefix of "sub/dir" and a name of "file" is interpreted by the tar specification as "sub/dir/file".

The path field has a special meaning, setting it will affect the fields name and prefix by balancing the path components between those two, e.g. a value of "a/file" will set prefix to "a" and name to "file". The path value can either be specified as an option or via command line argument (see Usage). The latter form is for convenience and offers some auto-magic like appending a trailing / if the type has been previously set to directory. Please take note that this form is only applied if neither prefix nor name has been previously set.

File permissions can be set by mode but only numeric constants are allowed, octal notations like 0755 are supported. File ownership can either be set with uid (user id) and gid (group id) or with user or group or both.

File modification time is set by mtime in seconds since epoch (Unix time). If the special value "now"is supplied, mtime is set to the current time UTC.

The file type can be set with type using either a single character or an alias string as you can see in the table below:

The field link is only of relevance if the type is set to either h (hard link) or l (symbolic link).

Device numbers, major and minor, are only of relevance if the type is set to either c (character device) or b (block device).

This implementation follows the USTAR (Unix Standard TAR) specification for portable tar archives as defined by POSIX.1-1988 and POSIX.1-2001.

It does not have support for extended header capabilities, later enhancements to overcome the fixed field size limitations and the inability to store additional fields like Extended Attributes.

Some restrictions are resumed in the GNU Manual:

• File names can contain at most 255 bytes.
• File names longer than 100 bytes must be split at a directory separator in two parts, the first being at most 155 bytes long. So, in most cases file names must be a bit shorter than 255 bytes.
• Symbolic links can contain at most 100 bytes.
• Files can contain at most 8 GiB (2^33 bytes = 8,589,934,592 bytes).
• UIDs, GIDs, device major numbers, and device minor numbers must be less than 2^21 (2,097,152).

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euE -o pipefail

source ustar.bash

USTAR_OPTIONS=user+group=root,mtime=now

pack() {
  ustar-dump -D a
  ustar-dump -F a/file "lorem ipsum"
  ustar-dump -Lo target=file a/symlink
}

pack

$ examples/demo.sh | tar -tvf -
drwxrwxr-x root/root         0 2023-07-31 13:37 a/
-rw-r--r-- root/root        11 2023-07-31 13:37 a/file
lrwxrwxrwx root/root         0 2023-07-31 13:37 a/symlink -> file

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# A simple program that packs itself into a tar archive.

set -euE -o pipefail

# shellcheck source=/dev/null
source ustar.bash

pack() {
  ustar-dump -Fo"$(stat -Lc mode=%04a,mtime=%Y,size=%s -- "$1")" "$(basename "$1")"
  dd if="$1" ibs=512 conv=sync status=none
}

pack "$0"

$ examples/echo.sh | tar -tvf -
-rwxr-xr-x 0/0             298 2023-07-31 13:37 echo.sh

For a full listing please see examples/demo.mk.

$ make -f examples/demo.mk clean all
mkdir -p tmp/ustar/
./ustar.bash -o group=root -o mode=0644 -o mtime=1697399708 -o name=README -o prefix=ustar.bash-7c92690 -o size=0 -o type=file -o user=root -- "" "A demo archive with ustar.bash and make" > tmp/ustar/README
./ustar.bash -o group=root -o mode=0755 -o mtime=1697399708 -o name=lib/ustar.bash -o prefix=ustar.bash-7c92690 -o size=7450 -o type=file -o user=root -- "" "" > tmp/ustar/lib-ustar
./ustar.bash -o group=root -o link=../lib/ustar.bash -o mode=0777 -o mtime=1697399708 -o name=bin/ustar-dump -o prefix=ustar.bash-7c92690 -o size=0 -o type=symlink -o user=root -- "" "" > tmp/ustar/bin-ustar
dd if=tmp/ustar/README of=demo.tar ibs=512 conv=sync,notrunc oflag=append status=none 
dd if=tmp/ustar/lib-ustar of=demo.tar ibs=512 conv=sync,notrunc oflag=append status=none 
dd if=ustar.bash of=demo.tar ibs=512 conv=sync,notrunc oflag=append status=none 
dd if=tmp/ustar/bin-ustar of=demo.tar ibs=512 conv=sync,notrunc oflag=append status=none 
tar -tvf demo.tar
-rw-r--r-- root/root        39 2023-10-15 21:55 ustar.bash-7c92690/README
-rwxr-xr-x root/root      7450 2023-10-15 21:55 ustar.bash-7c92690/lib/ustar.bash
lrwxrwxrwx root/root         0 2023-10-15 21:55 ustar.bash-7c92690/bin/ustar-dump -> ../lib/ustar.bash
gzip -kf demo.tar

Only GNU Bash 4.3+ is required with array support enabled.