[clue] is tar deprecated? (talk)

[dennisjperkins at comcast.net]

I've never heard of Pax. According to the Wikipedia article, it is supposed to be included in all LSB-compliant systems. 

Pax appears to be a solution in search of a problem. 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Will" <will.sterling at gmail.com> 
To: "CLUE's mailing list" <clue at cluedenver.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 12:13:43 PM 
Subject: Re: [clue] is tar deprecated? (talk) 

I thought I'd add a side note. 


In UNIX/POSIX it was decided many moons ago to deprecate tar and cpio and replace them with a new command called pax. GNUs continued use and updating of both tar and cpio as well as the commercial UNIXes including the GNU core utilities seems to have stopped the move to pax in common usage. 


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_(Unix) 


On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Dan Kulinski < daniel at kulinski.net > wrote: 


Tar allows you to concatenate files together. Gzip allows you to compress a single file (although there is support for concatenated gzip files). .Tgz is the operation of both of these. A Zip file is structured in such a way that it provides both the storage container and the compression at the same time. In fact if you explore a Zip file you will find that each file itself will generally undergo different compressions. However, there is a distinct disadvantage to this, the compression can not take advantage of redundancy in multiple files so the archives are not as compact. 

Although now well understood, the Zip file format is not as open as the .tar.gz file format. It was originally designed by PKWARE and the specifications were trademarked. 

As far as file interchange goes, .zip is currently more universal as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux generally have built in decompressors. Mac OS X and Linux can by default address TAR and GZIP files. 

On UNIX and UNIX like systems I always tend to use tar and gzip together because I know they exist on the systems. Debian for instance usually doesn't include the unzip utility by default. 

Dan Kulinski 





On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:30 AM, Mike Bean < beandaemon at gmail.com > wrote: 

<blockquote>



Our SQL guy asked me an interesting question, I didn't honestly have an answer, I thought it might be worthwhile to pose to the group. He doesn't understand why .tgz is still in use. To his mind, gzip renders the usefulness of tar questionable. So why tar a file and THEN zip it, when you can just zip it??? 


I honestly didn't know how to respond. Any insights? 


Mike Bean 

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