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List:       tru64-unix-managers
Subject:    Summary: new tar broken under V3.0?
From:       "Danny J. Mitzel" <dmitzel () whitney ! hitc ! com>
Date:       1995-01-31 7:29:45
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The other day I asked about a problem with OSF/1 3.0 'tar' interoperability
problems with older versions of tar.  Here's a quick summary of the info
I received:
- the V3.0 tar is based  on a new code base which is intended to be POSIX
  compliant, it is actually a link to 'pax'.
- someone reported that the difference is that the new version writes out
  a tar file header in which fields are padded with spaces as opposed to
  being zero-terminated, this format is not recognized by the older tars.
  it's possible to write a filter to convert back to the older format by
  comparing the /usr/include/tar.h header format between the new OSF version
  and an older version.
- the old version can be obtained by loading the OSFOBSOLETE300 package.
- a couple people suggested using the GNU tar which is portable across
  a large number of OS'es and has several nice features such a auto-decompress
  of tar.gz files [available via ftp://prep.ai.mit.edi/pub/gnu/]
- OSF/1 V3.2 due out in mid-February is supposed to contain a number of
  bug fixes, some of which are related to tar/cpio

thanks to:
"Benoit Maillard" <benoit@fgt.dec.com>
"Dr. Tom Blinn, 603-881-0646" <tpb@zk3.dec.com>
Selden E Ball Jr <SEB@LNS62.LNS.CORNELL.EDU>
"Michael G. Morrissey" <michael@dmi.stevens-tech.edu>
Dave Newbold <phdmn@siva.bris.ac.uk>
Carole Thompson <carole@callutheran.edu>

danny (dmitzel@whitney.hitc.com)

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