mplementation had security holes; see . We don't expect that any tar archives in practical use have type 'N' records, but if you have one and you trust its contents, you can decode it with GNU tar 1.16 or earlier. * Race conditions have been fixed that in some cases briefly allowed files extracted by 'tar -x --same-owner' (or plain 'tar -x', when running as root) to be accessed by users that they shouldn't have been.