* W Eryk Wolski [06-21-06 12:39]:

On an "old" 2 years debian install "man tar" displays an quite informative man file with an usefull example section.

The same "man tar" on suse produces a practically uselless several pages long listing of all available tar options.

I thought that tar is standard so I am expecting that the tar files are the same on various distros. How I can replace the uselless man pages with the more usefull one which I knew from debian?

"info tar" will provide what you expect. Install "pinfo" for an easier navagating 'info' command. Most packages that have man files also have info files which may (or may not) be more informative. -- Patrick Shanahan Registered Linux User #207535 http://wahoo.no-ip.org @ http://counter.li.org HOG # US1244711 Photo Album: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/gallery2 -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

On Wednesday 21 June 2006 12:31 pm, W Eryk Wolski wrote:

Hi,

On an "old" 2 years debian install "man tar" displays an quite informative man file with an usefull example section.

The same "man tar" on suse produces a practically uselless several pages long listing of all available tar options.

I thought that tar is standard so I am expecting that the tar files are the same on various distros. How I can replace the uselless man pages with the more usefull one which I knew from debian? Try 'info tar'. The GNU people don't like man and prefer to use info, and we use GNU tar. -- Jerry Feldman Boston Linux and Unix user group http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9 PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 17:31 +0100, W Eryk Wolski wrote:

Hi, On an "old" 2 years debian install "man tar" displays an quite informative man file with an usefull example section. The same "man tar" on suse produces a practically uselless several pages long listing of all available tar options. I thought that tar is standard so I am expecting that the tar files are the same on various distros. How I can replace the uselless man pages with the more usefull one which I knew from debian?

GNU Tar changed _radically_ at 1.13 or 1.14 (can't remember). This is because the "ustar" format changed with the new "Austin Group" (largely developments between the IEEE and X/Open that went into IEEE POSIX 2001+ and X/Open SUS v3). So it might be that you're looking at a "bare" man page for the new Tar version, one they didn't want to repeat in the old version. Or ... On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 13:26 -0400, Patrick Shanahan wrote:

"info tar" will provide what you expect. Install "pinfo" for an easier navagating 'info' command.

Sounds like they moved a lot of detail to the new "info" page for GNU Tar. Given the fact that the earlier Tar version was released back when POSIX 1988 was current, that makes sense. Those GNU Tar versions were augmented over POSIX 1988 and there are now incompatibilities and other issues that are now non-standard with the new "ustar" format updates in POSIX 2001+/SUS v3. -- Bryan J. Smith Professional, technical annoyance mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org http://thebs413.blogspot.com ---------------------------------------------------------- The existence of Linux has far more to do with the breakup of AT&T's monopoly than anything Microsoft has ever done. -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com