Source: POSIX ustar and pax (IEEE Std 1003.1) and the GNU tar manual's format chapter. The normative reader and writer rules are in
archive.md ("Tar").
| Types | TarReader, TarWriter, TarEntry (every header field, the pax records and the sparse map), TarReaderOptions, TarWriterOptions |
| Reads | V7, ustar, pax (global and per-entry records), GNU long names and links, and sparse files in the old GNU, pax 0.0, 0.1 and 1.0 forms |
| Writes | pax (default) or ustar, byte-exact: records sorted by key, no host-dependent fields, a fixed record size (default 10240) |
| Limits | MaxExtendedHeaderSize 1 MiB, MaxSparseRegions 100,000, plus the shared ArchiveLimits |
| Compressed forms | .tar.gz, .tar.zst, .tar.lz4, .tar.xz, .tar.lz, .tar.bz2 (read only) are one archive to Archive.Open |
| Not supported | multi-volume archives (typed unsupported error) |