tar / pax with greater than 8 gig files?

[John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost>]

Hi,

It's 2015 and I'd thought by now we'd have tar / pax which could handle 
files larger than 8 gigs. gnutar from pkgsrc apparently does, but it 
doesn't handle spanning tapes.

gnutar and supposedly BSD-tar does this, but NetBSD's tar does not:

Numeric values are encoded in octal numbers using ASCII digits, with 
leading zeroes. For historical reasons, a final NUL or space character 
should be used. Thus although there are 12 bytes reserved for storing the 
file size, only 11 octal digits can be stored. This gives a maximum file 
size of 8 gigabytes on archived files. To overcome this limitation, star 
in 2001 introduced a base-256 coding that is indicated by setting the 
high-order bit of the leftmost byte of a numeric field. GNU-tar and 
BSD-tar followed this idea. Additionally, versions of tar from before the 
first POSIX standard from 1988 pad the values with spaces instead of 
zeroes.

Does anyone know why we don't?

John