poka.sh

 Docs

TAR

Generated by scripts/gen-format-pages.py from docs/data/format-metadata/, FILE_FORMATS.csv and docs/formats-master.csv. Do not edit by hand: change the source, then run the script.

Tar Preview.

At a glance
Purpose A tar archive (or a gzip-compressed tar): files and directories stored one after another with their headers.
Extensions .tar
Poka parser poka-tar
Viewer poka-table-viewer
Depth tier Parser with a shared viewer (see Depth tiers)
Breadth tier B4 Summary (see Breadth tiers)

How much Poka reads

B4 Summary. The container and metadata are read and summarised (counts, properties, structure), but the main content is not rendered.

Confidence: medium (the reviewer read the code). Basis: Reviewed 2026-10-26: read parsers/poka-tar/src/main.rs (349 lines) and plugin.json. The three unit tests cover a healthy archive (plain and gzipped), an entry running past the end and a gzip stream that ends early; the corpus has INITools-0.2.tar.gz and test-nested-tarball.tar, read by no test. Covers .tar and .tar.gz. The tar crate walks every entry (ustar, GNU and pax headers, through gzip when the magic says so) and the table lists path, size, mode and modification time. Judgement: B4: the archive is listed but no member is extracted or shown.

What Poka does not read

  • Member contents are not extracted or shown
  • Owner, group, link targets and entry types other than directory are not shown
  • Only gzip is unwrapped: a tar inside bzip2, xz or zstd is not read here (those extensions go to other modules)
  • Nested archives are listed as files, not opened

Libraries

Libraries Poka uses or has assessed for this format, with the status, licence and language the registry records.

  • flate2 (used; MIT OR Apache-2.0; Rust)
  • tar (used; MIT OR Apache-2.0; Rust)
  • tar-no-std (candidate; MIT; Rust; https://github.com/phip1611/tar-no-std) — no_std, zero-allocation reader for basic/ustar/some PAX; no GNU long names or sparse files; wasm not mentioned on page.
  • libarchive (candidate; BSD-2-Clause; C; https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive) — Reads V7, ustar, GNU, Solaris and PAX tar; licence is 2-clause BSD-style per COPYING (build scripts differ).
  • astral-tokio-tar (candidate; MIT OR Apache-2.0; Rust; https://github.com/astral-sh/tokio-tar) — Async tar reader/writer fork; README says it is being deprecated; needs tokio, so less suited to wasm32-wasip1.

Sources

  • parsers/poka-tar/src/main.rs
  • parsers/poka-tar/plugin.json