What is the purpose of using relative path names when creating a tar file?

Both AIX and Linux tar implementations support relative and absolute path names equally, so relative paths confer no special cross-platform compatibility advantage.

Relative paths produce the opposite behavior - they allow flexible destination selection rather than locking extraction to a specific directory, which is what absolute paths would enforce.

Restoring to a raw device involves specifying a block device as the output target during extraction and is entirely unrelated to whether the archive was created with relative or absolute path names.

When a tar archive is created using relative path names, no absolute root is embedded in the archive metadata. At restore time, the extraction occurs relative to whatever directory the user is in when the tar command is run, allowing files to be placed in any location on any system simply by changing to the desired directory before extracting.