Containers: pitfalls of incomplete tar archives

Containers: pitfalls of incomplete tar archives As Colin Walters likes to say, containers are just tarballs wrapped in JSON. We’ll mostly ignore the JSON part here, but there’s a lot to unpack (pun and foreshadowing intended) with regards to tar and how it interacts with the various pieces that work in conjunction to make containers a reality. A refresher on tar Let’s explore a key quirk of tar from which everything else we’ll discuss follows.