tar: corrupted octal value in tar header

[Peter Renzland]

On 09  Sep 19, at 20:32 , Denys Vlasenko wrote:

> On Sunday 20 September 2009 01:04, Peter Renzland wrote:
>> I am attaching a file: snow.tar
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>>
>> Thanks.
>
> Works for me. Please post your .config file
> (mine is attached).
>
> Also test with newest busybox - 1.15.1
> --
> vda
> <.config.bz2>

The closest thing appears to be scripts/defconfig:

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which appears to have the identical tar configs, i.e. all turned on.

I am still interested in finding out what causes this error.

There appears to be exactly one place that generates this error message:

getOctal in archival/libunarchive/get_header_tar.c:

/* NB: _DESTROYS_ str[len] character! */
static unsigned long long getOctal(char *str, int len)
{
     unsigned long long v;
     /* NB: leading spaces are allowed. Using strtoull to handle that.
      * The downside is that we accept e.g. "-123" too :)
      */
     str[len] = '\0';
     v = strtoull(str, &str, 8);
     if (*str && (!ENABLE_FEATURE_TAR_OLDGNU_COMPATIBILITY || *str !=  
' '))
         bb_error_msg_and_die("corrupted octal value in tar header");
     return v;
}
#define GET_OCTAL(a) getOctal((a), sizeof(a))


Can someone please explain what is meant by "corrupted octal value",  
in this context?
What is this message trying to say?

As Denys says, the (POSIX) file format works for his setup.
So, if the program says "corrupted", what is going on?

Was the program buggy in 1.14.2 and is fixed in 1.15.1?
Or would this error message be the expected result of an incorrect  
config file for POSIX format?

Thanks.