> I am confused as to why this behavior also carries over to MinGW versions of these tools. After all, I thought the whole point of MinGW was not to try to prov

> I am confused as to why this behavior also carries over to MinGW versions of these tools. After all, I thought the whole point of MinGW was not to try to provide a POSIX layer. Not really. MinGW's compilation environment doesn't try to provide a POSIX layer-- if you build something with MinGW, you get a native Windows executable that runs exclusively against the APIs provided by Windows (it's a replacement for the MSVC toolchain). The MinGW/MSYS/MSYS2 toolchain itself, though (including gcc, binutils, and the shell and coreutils that it's usually installed with), requires a POSIX environment. They got this by forking Cygwin-- which explains why you see the same behavior between Cygwin's tar and MSYS's tar. They share the same behavior because they share code. (The old MSYS was a pretty old fork of Cygwin that they didn't keep up-to-date with upstream, but MSYS2 tries to stay pretty close to upstream Cygwin when they can.)