Star Stable Files

[Evangeline Mellon]

I'm getting an error that I've never seen before when running sudo apt update. The error happens after reaching stable/main amd64 Packages. I haven't done anything recently that I know of that could have suddenly caused this error to happen.

I've read in other places that removing the entry from my software update sources will get rid of the error. But wouldn't that mean I would no longer get updates for Google Chrome? I would think there must be a better solution than that.

On Ubuntu 18.04 system you can list and remove PPA using Software & Updates application. Start Software & Updates application , navigate to Other Software tab and Remove or Edit any highlighted PPA repositories:

I note no problems with AMD64, all are i386. Any package that are "all" architectures are symbolically linked to "AMD64" where the actual files reside this makes it so I do not have to upload the file twice (is all arch's right). So, in essence I will have to physically create a "InRelease" file via each architecture. I hope I helped someone & at least I hope you understand how repositories work.

In computing, tar is a computer software utility for collecting many files into one archive file, often referred to as a tarball, for distribution or backup purposes. The name is derived from "tape archive", as it was originally developed to write data to sequential I/O devices with no file system of their own, such as devices that use magnetic tape. The archive data sets created by tar contain various file system parameters, such as name, timestamps, ownership, file-access permissions, and directory organization. POSIX abandoned tar in favor of pax, yet tar sees continued widespread use.

The command-line utility was first introduced in the Version 7 Unix in January 1979, replacing the tp program (which in turn replaced "tap").[7] The file structure to store this information was standardized in POSIX.1-1988[8] and later POSIX.1-2001,[9] and became a format supported by most modern file archiving systems. The tar command was abandoned in POSIX.1-2001 in favor of pax command, which was to support ustar file format; the tar command was indicated for withdrawal in favor of pax command at least since 1994.

Many historic tape drives read and write variable-length data blocks, leaving significant wasted space on the tape between blocks (for the tape to physically start and stop moving). Some tape drives (and raw disks) support only fixed-length data blocks. Also, when writing to any medium such as a file system or network, it takes less time to write one large block than many small blocks. Therefore, the tar command writes data in records of many 512 B blocks. The user can specify a blocking factor, which is the number of blocks per record. The default is 20, producing 10 KiB records.[13]

A tar archive consists of a series of file objects, hence the popular term tarball, referencing how a tarball collects objects of all kinds that stick to its surface. Each file object includes any file data, and is preceded by a 512-byte header record. The file data is written unaltered except that its length is rounded up to a multiple of 512 bytes. The original tar implementation did not care about the contents of the padding bytes, and left the buffer data unaltered, but most modern tar implementations fill the extra space with zeros.[14] The end of an archive is marked by at least two consecutive zero-filled records. (The origin of tar's record size appears to be the 512-byte disk sectors used in the Version 7 Unix file system.) The final block of an archive is padded out to full length with zeros.

The file header record contains metadata about a file. To ensure portability across different architectures with different byte orderings, the information in the header record is encoded in ASCII. Thus if all the files in an archive are ASCII text files, and have ASCII names, then the archive is essentially an ASCII text file (containing many NUL characters).

The fields defined by the original Unix tar format are listed in the table below. The link indicator/file type table includes some modern extensions. When a field is unused it is filled with NUL bytes. The header uses 257 bytes, then is padded with NUL bytes to make it fill a 512 byte record. There is no "magic number" in the header, for file identification.

Numeric values are encoded in octal numbers using ASCII digits, with leading zeroes. For historical reasons, a final NUL or space character should also be used. Thus although there are 12 bytes reserved for storing the file size, only 11 octal digits can be stored. This gives a maximum file size of 8 gigabytes on archived files. To overcome this limitation, in 2001 star introduced a base-256 coding that is indicated by setting the high-order bit of the leftmost byte of a numeric field.[citation needed] GNU-tar and BSD-tar followed this idea. Additionally, versions of tar from before the first POSIX standard from 1988 pad the values with spaces instead of zeroes.

The checksum is calculated by taking the sum of the unsigned byte values of the header record with the eight checksum bytes taken to be ASCII spaces (decimal value 32). It is stored as a six digit octal number with leading zeroes followed by a NUL and then a space. Various implementations do not adhere to this format. In addition, some historic tar implementations treated bytes as signed. Implementations typically calculate the checksum both ways, and treat it as good if either the signed or unsigned sum matches the included checksum.

Unix filesystems support multiple links (names) for the same file. If several such files appear in a tar archive, only the first one is archived as a normal file; the rest are archived as hard links, with the "name of linked file" field set to the first one's name. On extraction, such hard links should be recreated in the file system.

Most modern tar programs read and write archives in the UStar (Unix Standard TAR[7][15]) format, introduced by the POSIX IEEE P1003.1 standard from 1988. It introduced additional header fields. Older tar programs will ignore the extra information (possibly extracting partially named files), while newer programs will test for the presence of the "ustar" string to determine if the new format is in use. The UStar format allows for longer file names and stores additional information about each file. The maximum filename size is 256, but it is split among a preceding path "filename prefix" and the filename itself, so can be much less.[16]

Type '7' (Contiguous file) is formally marked as reserved in the POSIX standard, but was meant to indicate files which ought to be contiguously allocated on disk. Few operating systems support creating such files explicitly, and hence most TAR programs do not support them, and will treat type 7 files as if they were type 0 (regular). An exception is older versions of GNU tar, when running on the MASSCOMP RTU (Real Time Unix) operating system, which supported an O_CTG flag to the open() function to request a contiguous file; however, that support was removed from GNU tar version 1.24 onwards.

In 1997, Sun proposed a method for adding extensions to the tar format. This method was later accepted for the POSIX.1-2001 standard. This format is known as extended tar format or pax format. The new tar format allows users to add any type of vendor-tagged vendor-specific enhancements. The following tags are defined by the POSIX standard:

In 2001, the Star program became the first tar to support the new format.[citation needed] In 2004, GNU tar supported the new format,[17] though it does not write it as its default output from the tar program yet.[18]

A tarpipe is the method of creating an archive on the standard output file of the tar utility and piping it to another tar process on its standard input, working in another directory, where it is unpacked. This process copies an entire source directory tree including all special files, for example:

The tar format continues to be used extensively for open-source software distribution. *NIX-distributions use it in various source- and binary-package distribution mechanisms, with most software source code made available in compressed tar archives.[citation needed]

Many older tar implementations do not record nor restore extended attributes (xattrs) or access-control lists (ACLs). In 2001, Star introduced support for ACLs and extended attributes, through its own tags for POSIX.1-2001 pax. bsdtar uses the star extensions to support ACLs.[22] More recent versions of GNU tar support Linux extended attributes, reimplementing star extensions.[23] A number of extensions are reviewed in the filetype manual for BSD tar, tar(5).[22]

A tarbomb, in hacker slang, is a tar file that contains many files that extract into the working directory. Such a tar file can create problems by overwriting files of the same name in the working directory, or mixing one project's files into another. It is at best an inconvenience to the user, who is obliged to identify and delete a number of files interspersed with the directory's other contents. Such behavior is considered bad etiquette on the part of the archive's creator.

A related problem is the use of absolute paths or parent directory references when creating tar files. Files extracted from such archives will often be created in unusual locations outside the working directory and, like a tarbomb, have the potential to overwrite existing files. However, modern versions of FreeBSD and GNU tar do not create or extract absolute paths and parent-directory references by default, unless it is explicitly allowed with the flag -P or the option --absolute-names. The bsdtar program, which is also available on many operating systems and is the default tar utility on Mac OS X v10.6, also does not follow parent-directory references or symbolic links.[24][failed verification]

The tar format was designed without a centralized index or table of content for files and their properties for streaming to tape backup devices. The archive must be read sequentially to list or extract files. For large tar archives, this causes a performance penalty, making tar archives unsuitable for situations that often require random access to individual files.

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