pax(1) does not support the pax interchange format. Support is both useful (e.g., to get around the 8GB file size limit of the ustar interchange format) and required for conformance with SUSv3/SUSv4. Fix: Ideally, use libarchive(3); although it would probably be more straightforward to implement the (partial) pax interchange support from Mac OS X pax: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/file_cmds/file_cmds-220.7/pax/pax_format.c How-To-Repeat: $ pax -x pax pax: Unknown -x format: pax pax: Known -x formats are: bcpio cpio sv4cpio sv4crc tar ustar ..
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I'll add my ask for the pax interchange format. I prefer the pax command line, compared to tar(1).
Updating pax based on either one or both of Apple's and OpenBSD's version would be a fine idea if someone's looking for a project. Another fine idea would be to use libarchive, and submit the libarchive-based pax upstream there.
Note that while Apple's pax used to be a fork of OpenBSD's, it is now a fork of ours, with modifications for POSIX conformance: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/file_cmds/blob/main/pax/pax.plist.part
I'd like to note that in OpenBSD 7.6, they are defaulting to pax format for tar and for pax. Might that be a worthwhile change as well?