Quote:
Originally Posted by
alister
pax should be available on any UNIX system (GNU's Not UNIX
).
Quote:
Originally Posted by
raggmopp
True, pax SHOULD be available. But sometimes it is not.
I think some distros install by default and some don't. With cpio it is always installed by default.
pax is present on OS X, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, IRIX, etc. On some of those platforms it has been included since the mid-90s. GNU/Linux is the only notable exception, which is why I specifically said "UNIX" and included the GNU parenthetical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Corona688
Basically -- tar won. It got standardized and modernized in POSIX. cpio didn't.
If by "won" you mean that it's ubiquitous. Agreed. But standardized? You must be joking.
tar is not standardized in any way. There is no POSIX standard. There isn't even a defacto standard. There are about as many different implementations with conflicting syntaxes as there are operating systems.
tar is very much like ps. It is guaranteed to be available on just about any system you use, but if portability is a concern, you will need to restrict your usage to its simplest features. The moment you need to portably do anything fancy, you're screwed.
If GNU/Linux distributors would ship pax, pax would be the first standardized (on paper and in practice) archiver available on just about every platform.
Regards,
Alister