TAR
Well, I ran into the same problems. It seemed to me that the tars that I
was attempting to use didn't like the OS that I had, so I took the docs
and wrote a un-tar program. It will break out the files in a tar archive
into the individual files with respect to the directory structure, but
that is it. It will not make tar archives. It does not support
compression or any other "standard" tar features. It will un-tar plain
tar archives though. If you want it, drop me a note and I will send it to
you (source code included if you want to improve it).
Bill