Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> wrote:
The OP does not seem to understand that with beginning to write star in 1982, "tar" is not the name of a single program but that there are more such implementations.
I (OP) have seen no such discussion in any docs. When looking up tar, such as in a Linux reference manual (e.g. ISBN: 0-7821-2735-5 or 0-7821-2341-4), tar
Send a bug report to the gtar people. Star's documentation mentions PD-TAR aka SUG-tar that later was renamed to gtar as the second free tar implementation and explains that PD-TAR/SUG-tar was closer to the standard than gtar.
--help, or man tar, there's been no explicit or implicit mention that tar is
The "real" tar does not implement --help.
anything but GNU tar, no direct or indirect mention of gtar or star posing as
GNU tar is not tar, it does not even correctly implement the SUSv2 tar standard CLI - regardless on thether called as "tar" or "gtar". star on the other side correctly implements the SUSv2 standard CLI in case star was called as "tar". Star implements the gtar deviations if the basename in argv[0] begins with a "g". I entered this thread because many people on Linux don't know that Linux does not deliver a real tar but gtar installed as "tar" even though star installed as tar would cause less problems. Well, there is a general problem, on Linux: people write scripts that call "tar" using a commandline that would never be accepted by a compliant tar implementation. Typical Linux problems could be dramatically reduced if Linux did install gtar as gtar and if scripts that expect the gtar CLI called gtar instead of calling tar.
tar. The man page does mention a utar format, but doesn't say why it might be needed or desired. I've seen nothing prior to this thread to imply one should
The gtar man page is not optimal. Star by default creates ustar (POSIX.1-1988) compliant archives by default since 1994. All tar implementations that failed with that tar archive format have been proven not to follow even the basic tar archive format rules from 1977 - this included gtar at that time (PD-tar was OK).
expect a tar file created by an x86 Linux system's installed by default tar command using the most common tar options shouldn't be expected to be extracted without special options by the installed by default tar command on another x86 Linux system, including one that substitutes busybox for a shell and individual binary tools like tar.
Let me repeat: busybox does not include the real tar but an own potentially buggy implementation. If you like to know whether your problem was caused by the archive format created by gtar or by the "tar" implementation in busybox, you would need to provide a sample archive for investigation. If you like to do this by your own, you could get star sources, compile them and call the included "tartest" program that tests for archive compliance. Jörg -- EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) joerg.schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org