tar(1) doesn't understand pax extended headers. attached is a patch which will simply ignore pax headers. see http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pax.html for a description of the headers and their format. in the above documentation the type is referred to by 'typeflag', and in tar.c, linkflag. pax extended headers have two types, 'x' and 'g'. the main thing that these seem to be useful for are file names which are longer than whats normally representable. right now, tar(1) will treat these pax extended headers as normal "files" and extract the headers to disk, cluttering the fs. for now we could simply ignore them (easy), but it would be ideal to read them to find the long path names. the only trouble with this is that one needs to parse all of the pax 'size key=value\n' attributes in the pax extended header, finding the 'path' key and using its value as the new path. there's already some provision for this in tar.c's "getname" function. there's also no fixed size for these pax attributes, so filenames can (in theory) be of unlimited length. if anyone wants to pick this up, the "archive/tar" package in go seems like a decent reference.