[vorakl]

I asked about options for GNU tar because there is a bit of strange behavior.

To add absolute paths to an archive, there is "-P" option, and man says it works only for creating archives: "Don't strip leading slashes from filenames when creating archives".

To extract absolute paths from the archive, you need to add the "-C /" option, and although the tool says "tar: Strip leading `/' from member names", it will still extract it in the right place because the paths become relative and -C puts them in the root.

However, if you add "-P" during the extraction (which is not mentioned in man), the "strip leading slashes" information disappears.

So if this message bothers someone, "tar -C / -xPf file.tar" will cleanly extract absolute paths from the archive ;)