every time. You can't seem to follow the thread. Ben exactly nailed it.

"Take files on an HFS filesystem. Tar them using standard unix tools."

Can you manage to follow those directions? Apparently not. I believe cp and mv has similar issues BTW.

You say:
"That would be an obvious error, right there, and implies being clueless about how file storage works."

That would be perhaps one of the more pompous and idiotic things you've ever said. Which is saying a lot.

What exactly is *obvious* about that error?

I have a commercial unix, with command line tools, that has a proprietary file system. For the most part the command line tools behave exactly as they do on any other unix. cat, mv, cp, ls, ln, all work like you would expect despite the underlying file system being HFS.

And I should obviously expect that with these tools all working as expected that the tar implementation that ships with that system would have issues with the files? Pray tell why? Clearly, the other tools have been modified to work on HFS.

It seems to me the very height of reasonable for a vendor shipping an OS with a set of file manipulation utilities would go to a bit of work to extend the utilities to work properly on their file system. The fact that they didn't is what I found really very surprising.

Fortunately, the community has answered and some extended utilities have been developed like the aforementioned hfstar, which works exactly like tar - because it is - only on hfs systems it converts the resource forks to the directory wrapper format you keep harping about on your wife's system.

Which is basically what I expected Apple would have shipped with the system and called "tar".

So shame on Apple for shipping lame assed tools like this.

But to imply that this is obvious is - well - really quite stupid.