Rowan Collins wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical:
On 01/06/05, james jamessampford@supanet.com wrote:
just finished downloading the en image dump, tried extracting it with winrar -
http://download.wikimedia.org/images/README_ABOUT_FILE_FORMAT.txt mentions how to extract them correctly under *NIX system - so one way would be to get cygwin up and running.
hmm. i completely forgot that people might want to extract the images under non-Unix systems... :-( the pax format is standard, but it's not widely used - it's not the same as GNU's version, although GNU tar can read them. i guess most "multi-function" archive tools only understand POSIX and GNU tar format.
i don't have a Windows system here to test, but if someone wants to recommend an easy way to extract pax archives under Windows, i'll include it there. maybe we could distribute a standalone version of the Cygwin binary?
A quick search also turned up this Windows port of a "libarchive" which seems like it may include a compatible "tar" utility - http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/libarchive.htm
this looks fine. i've added a link to here in the readme for now.
kate.