TomK wrote:

>>What release of AIX are you using?
>
> 5.3-02 and 5.3-04-csp

I consider the behaviour you described as plain bug.
Not to mention the respective documentation doesn't explain
anything related. I guess you verified that you used the
original /usr/bin/pax (that is, you didn't get something else by
accident). Have you tried to find out about patches for you
AIX release?

As last try, you could switch to paranoia mode, delete the environment
("env -i") in case the strange behaviour is triggered from there and
also explicitly name the tar archiving format ("-x ustar").

$ env -i /usr/bin/pax -wX -f archive -x ustar directory

Otherwise, yes, I'd switch to "find -xdev" & tar until getting
a fixed pax.