Algorithms for tar and dump [closed]

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I need to know how tar, dump, cpio works. what is the algorithm behind all these program. How does tar traverse a file system tree, etc. Where can I get the details?

Thanks

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If you want to know in detail how they work, you can download the source code of GNU tar, GNU cpio and ext2 dump.

If you have specific, more high-level question about one of them, you can ask a new question about that.