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Originally Posted by
DGPickett
Maybe it was that tar I got on my favorite jacket at Mystic Seaport.
You seem to have a newer tar, that has compression and allows '-' arguments, but there are some really old ones out there that do not behave as normally or nice.
I gzipped the files after.
tar and cpio were standardized at the same time. You might also find it illuminating that POSIX-2001 restandardized the tar format in a backwards-compatible way to support files >8GB, but cpio couldn't be adapted -- they
removed it from POSIX instead. It's gone.
In short -- tar won, cpio lost. On many of my systems it didn't even come with the base OS!
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This forum is not UNIX-flavor-specific, and I hate it when an old command refuses my examples!
Preaching to the choir, my friend.
My personal bugbear is solaris /bin/sh...
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Also tar does not have a linking to original, not copying, option like cpio pass and cp, since when space was a concern and overwrite was not, the object was to create a clone tree of hard links?
This is true. tar and cpio are not totally equivalent in functionality.