I’ve been working on an open source tool for creating SBOMs from binaries/file systems. Automated extraction of archives like zip/tar files present interesting challenges - for a while I’ve known about OS filesystem formatting gotchas like archives from a Linux-based system with symlinks or case colliding names not extracting correctly on NTFS (and HFS+ for the latter case).

But the ambiguity of this tar files… I guess the “correct” extraction for what I’m doing would require figuring out what the system that is processing the tar files used and copy that behavior, which is non-trivial if you don’t know what an embedded device is using behind the scenes.

This guy, what a hero. He even included a little graphic to show how this "hardest tarball" looks like.

At the bottom, there's a link to much more edge cases.

It reminds me of this beauty: "Parsing JSON is a Minefield" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16897061