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From: meulenbr@cstw01.prl.philips.nl (Frans Meulenbroeks)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: POSIX compatible tar(1)
Message-ID: <718@prles2.UUCP>
Date: 26 Sep 89 07:56:25 GMT
References: <261@nikhefh.nikhef.nl> <1002@mgse.UUCP>
Sender: nobody@prles2.UUCP
Reply-To: meulenbr@cstw01.prl.philips.nl (Frans Meulenbroeks)
Organization: Centre for Software Technology, Philips Eindhoven
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As far as a POSIX compatible tar concerns:
Several moons ago a program called pax was posted to comp.sources.unix.
This program does the following:

---- Start of excerpt ----

    This is version 1.1 of Pax, a public domain archiving utility.  
    
    Pax is an archiving utility that reads and writes tar and cpio formats, 
    both the traditional ones and the extended formats specified in IEEE

    1003.1.  It handles multi-volume archives and automatically determines 
    the format of an archive while reading it.  Three user interfaces are 
    supported: tar, cpio, and pax.  The pax interface was designed by IEEE 
    1003.2 as a compromise in the chronic controversy over which of tar or 
    cpio is best.

    The USENIX Association provided some support for this implementation

    project.  As a result, the Pax utility is being distributed free of 
    charge and may be redistributed by others in either source or binary

    form.  (See the liscensing section for restrictions)

---- End of excerpt ----

I have not tried to port this program to Minix yet, but it looks like
this is going to be *the* thing.
There is only one disadvantage to the package. It's source is quite
large: somewhere around 260 k including man pages and so on.
However, this could be reduced, since it also includes (as posted) both
Doug Gwyns' directory functions and Henry Spencers' regexp package.

Frans Meulenbroeks        (meulenbr@cst.prl.philips.nl)
	Centre for Software Technology
	( or try: ...!mcvax!phigate!prle!cst!meulenbr)