What exactly is the GNU tar ././@LongLink “trick”?
I read that a tar entry type of 'L' (76) is used by gnu tar and gnu-compliant tar utilities to indicate that the next entry in the archive has a "long" name. In this case the header block with the entry type of 'L' usually encodes the name ././@LongLink . My question is: where is the format of the next block described? The format of a tar archive is very simple: it is just a series of 512-byte blocks. In the normal case, each file in a tar archive is represented as a series of blocks. The first block is a header block, containing the file name, entry type, modified time, and other metadata.